There are at least two kinds of games.One could be called finite, the other infinite.The finite game is played for the purpose of winning,an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play,...and bringing as many persons as possible into the play.Finite players play within boundaries;infinite players play with boundaries.

Let's face it: Most modern organizations have been designed as ‘finite games.’ All the rest of life, on the other hand, seems to have been designed as an ‘infinite game’ — leading to ever-increasing intricacy, resilience, vibrancy and co-creative collaboration throughout all of Nature’s living systems.

Project 10X is an organic strategy and approach to free our organizations from the gravitational pull of the ‘finite game’ mechanistic paradigm toward a new management & leadership model — organizations as conscious living systems.

Leading this paradign shift is not for the fainthearted — and it certainly ‘takes a village’ to pull it off. This is why Project 10X first and foremost focuses on growing highly distributed ‘leadership everywhere’ within and around your organization — leadership that is conscious, committed and courageous — leadership that is highly entrepreneurial, adaptable and systems-minded — leadership that rapidly grows its capacity to lead lasting systemic change and multiply the 'true wealth' the organization generates for all its stakeholders.

Is Project 10X a moonshot? Absolutely — and it’s a critical one for any organization realistic about surviving and thriving in the 21st century. But we also recognize that organization leaders must attend to their short- and medium-term objectives of increasing their organizations’ performance, innovation, engagement and growth — NOW. Project 10X is designed for BOTH-AND: It always begins with the top priority organizational challenge that the organization is facing here and now — and uses this [and other real-life] challenges as developmental drivers to grow leadership and changemaking capacity throughout the leadership networks in the organization.

Project 10X is low cost, can start small, and is designed to become self-managing and self-propagating early on — with benefits growing exponentially over time. The Project 10X approach can be tailored to any size and kind of organization where there is a strong commitment to the action-learning journey implicit in shifting the organization’s management paradigm.

Project 10X is an evolving action-learning initiative of 10X Shift and 10X Changemakers. We are inviting courageous leaders and organizations to partner with us in pioneering Project 10X starting in 2013.

Problem

A key ‘presenting problem’ organizations face today is the widening gap between their existing leadership capacity and the exploding demands of our increasingly complex and rapidly changing world. To use a computer metaphor, the old ‘leadership operating system’ is no longer able to keep up — to respond with sufficient agility and intelligence to the growing barrage of challenges and opportunities in the environment. Worse yet, we seem to be at a point where fixing and/or incrementally improving the old system is of little benefit — in fact, it is often counterproductive. The time is ripe for a major upgrade — a paradigm shift.

Before jumping into solutions, it is important that we fully understand the nature of this paradigm shift — and the root causes of inadequate leadership capacity in organizations today. Leadership doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It operates within larger context we refer to as ‘social architecture.’ You can think of social architecture as a purposeful web of social relationships and agreements that shapes how people behave, work, relate, communicate, what they believe and value, how they define success, and yes, how they lead. We argue that it is our dominant social architecture in organizations today (characterized by the Yellow to Red Zones in the figure below) that is the root cause of the many problems we are facing, including inadequate leadership.

More specifically —

Traditional organizations tend to embody ‘mechanistic,’ control-over-people, hierarchical designs that focus on satisfying narrow (and often myopic) needs of specific stakeholder families (e.g., stockholders, customers.) The ‘cultures’ of these traditional organizations cover the range described by the Red, Orange and Yellow Zones, with the Yellow Zone social patterns generally being ‘as good as it gets’ for such organizations.

Hierarchical, role-based, individualistic leadership seemed adequate in the mechanistic paradigm — but now we’re learning that it is a poor fit for the increasingly complex adaptive challenges that organizations face today. A new model is needed — one where leadership is a highly distributed, collective process networked throughout the organization’s functions and operations.

Traditional mechanistic, curriculum-centric, programmatic approaches to leadership development are increasingly inadequate in developing competencies that are so critical for today’s leaders, such as adaptability, self-awareness, systemic consciousness, boundary spanning collaboration, comfort with ambiguity, learning agility, etc.

According to Gallup, over 70% of the American workforce is disengaged (a whopping 89% worldwide) resulting in tremendous losses in productivity and innovation. Our traditional organizations with their Yellow-Orange-Red cultures have become ‘psychic prisons’ for millions of bright, capable individuals with an innate desire to contribute — to make a lasting difference.

The Green and Blue Zones describe the social architecture needed to support the kind of distributed leadership capable of surviving and thriving in a VUCA world. However, this territory is largely unexplored. A fundamental leadership challenge of our times is to support and guide our organizations in growing their capacity to cross ‘The Great Culture Chasm’ — to fully inhabit their unique Green-Blue Zones.

What makes this challenge so daunting is that it involves a fundamental shift in an organization’s patterns of thinking, communicating and working together. This in turn requires that current leaders develop themselves to become leading learners and learning leaders of this pattern-shifting work — and do so while dealing with many crises implicit in navigating “VUCA seas.”

Solution

Bucky Fuller famously said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Challenging and supporting this network to become the organization’s ‘changemaker infrastructure’ designed to support the organization in crossing ‘The Great Culture Chasm’ and developing responsive, resilient, self-evolving leadership throughout the organization.

The broad design for a Project 10X initiative in an organization includes the following elements and steps:

Senior leadership is supported in identifying the organization’s top priority capacity building challenge.(E.g., ‘greater agility and responsiveness,’ ‘more distributed leadership and decision making,’ ‘greater customer focus.’) Whatever the challenge, it must be considered a top priority by senior leadership and critical to the organization’s future. This helps ensure a high level of engagement from the senior team throughout the initiative as well as high visibility throughout the organization.

A ‘diagonal’ cohort of committed ‘changemakers’ is selected. These players are well respected, have high aptitude for change and development work, and are energized by the Challenge. They will be pioneering the new ‘changemaker’ role for the organization. The Cohort fully ‘owns’ the Challenge. All learning and development happen in the context of the Challenge.

Strong emphasis on growing a truly ‘generative’ 3-way alliance between the Cohort, Sponsors and Providers of development/change expertise. The Sponsors are the organization’s senior leaders who are highly invested in and committed to the success of this pioneering initiative. They see themselves as stewards of the organization’s future. The role of Providers is to serve as ‘social architects’ and guides on this pioneering journey — to support the Cohort and the Sponsors with highly relevant, just-in-time development/change expertise as they grow and tackle various challenges along the Project 10X’s action-learning journey. This 3-way co-creative partnership is a key to Project 10X’s potency and success.

Special focus on igniting individual growth, developing high quality relationships and evolving a highly generative culture. Cohort members are supported in discovering and developing their deepest commitments and gifts, in growing highly effective relationships with themselves, each other, the Stewards and the rest of the organization, and in evolving a highly generative culture of mutual caring, commitment and collaboration (see Green-Blue Zone culture in the figure below.) A primary task for the Cohort is to come forward with an organic, highly leveraged strategy and their recommended ‘bridge’ across the ‘Great Culture Chasm’ for the organization — in a way that accelerates progress on the Challenge.

The Cohort is challenged and supported in developing and evolving as a semi-autonomous ‘generative action-learning network’ of organizational changemakers. The ‘Providers’ serve as ‘guides on the side’ (rather than ‘sages on stage’) as the Cohort learns and grows by engaging with the organization, doing their scouting and research, testing their thinking and applying what they learn as they develop a highly generative strategy and path to addressing the Challenge and crossing the ‘Great Culture Chasm’.

The Cohort has 90 days to develop and begin to demonstrate a highly generative strategy and path forward that (a) address the Challenge, (b) evolve the new leadership model and (c) grow the organization’s capacity to inhabit their unique version of ‘Green-Blue Zone’ culture.These are the three highly synergistic, mutually supporting areas of learning, development and opportunity seeking for the Cohort. At the end of the 90-day period (which represents Phase 1 of the project), the Cohort presents their learnings, progress to date and their recommended path forward to the senior sponsors in each of the three areas. Together, they decide on whether and how to proceed with Phase 2. Their choices might include growing additional (and possibly more specialized) cohorts, focusing on new critical organization’s challenges, evolving a more elaborate development and change infrastructure in the organization, etc.

NOTE: The following detailed 3-phase picture of actions and outcomes is for illustration purposes only. Each Project 10X will unfold in an organic way that best fits the unique needs and opportunities of the organization in question.

Are There Examples of P10X Initiatives in Organizations? What Might It Actually Look Like?

While the various elements of the P10X approach draw from and have been demonstrated in countless organizational design, development and change initiatives through the years, Project 10X has not been fully ‘implemented’ inside an organization as of yet. (We are looking for 2-3 companies to partner with us in piloting the Project 10X approach starting in 2013.)

So, in response to Polly LaBarre’s challenge to ‘animate’ and bring Project 10X to life, we thought it would be appropriate to draw from the real stories of transformational change from this amazing MIX community — management innovators, leaders and changemakers like you!

One of the most fitting stories that can help illustrate the P10X approach is David Choe’s “How to start a movement in your company.” It describes how a team of highly engaged employees executed a massive business transformation and demonstrated a real cultural change in their company — in less than one year, with zero incremental FTE's and a minimal budget. (We highly recommend that you read this remarkable account of human genius, passionate commitment and highly resourceful and resilient distributed leadership.)

The following elements of David Choe’s story help animate Project 10X:

David’s initiative started with a very real, top priority ‘impossible’ challenge that the organization’s leadership deeply cared about; addressing it was critical to the company’s success. This provided a solid foundation for a 3-way generative alliance between the senior sponsors (mostly Bill,) David’s growing team, and those who provided necessary expertise (most notably Shiv.) The quality of the relationships between the sponsors and the team members are well summarized by what Bill said to David in the beginning: "I trust you'll figure it out. Call me if you're having problems." Full trust. Full support. Beautiful and powerful.

Solving the challenge demanded significant changes to the organization’s deeply entrenched cultural patterns of working, planning, decision-making, leading and communicating. In essence, David’s challenge was to shift the culture from what seemed like ‘Orange/Yellow Zone’ to ‘Green Zone’ — but to do so in the context of the challenge, so that the new cultural patterns were immediately integrated in the company’s everyday operations.

David’s strategy was organic and decisively commitment-based: he engaged and developed relationships with those committed innovators, early adopters and changemakers throughout the organization who shared his passion for and commitment to the initiative and the larger cultural shift.

Appreciation was a key approach from early on: David and his team set out to appreciate ‘the seeds of what’s right’ — to amplify and build on those behaviors and attitudes that supported the initiative and the ‘new way’ in the organization.

Action learning, rapid prototyping and experimentation, sourcing innovative ideas from everyone were the modus operandi. All learning happened in the context of the real challenge — no programmatic courses or classrooms. No formal leadership development programs either — everyone learned to lead by leading.

No predefined change methodologies — David and his team researched and applied just-in-time approaches that best fit the developmental challenges at hand

The pace of change and the benefits grew exponentially over time (and most likely are still growing) — a beautiful demonstration of the potency of truly organic, self-managing and self-propagating ‘generative’ design

A real breakthrough in the initial challenge — a successful overhaul of company’s order delivery system, with the operating income increasing by a whopping 80%!

A robust, silo-crossing, collaborative and highly distributed network of potent leaders and changemakers strengthened by working together on a real life challenge — now serving as a backbone for future complex transformational efforts

Sprouting seeds of a new, more generative ‘we can do it’ culture of distributed leadership, engagement, ownership, and collaboration

Much of what David and his team discovered intuitively and naturally in their groundbreaking initiative are explicit and deliberate design elements inside Project 10X:

Project 10X is real. It’s an action-learning journey fueled by real life, top priority organizational challenges. Much is at stake for everyone

It is an on-going capacity building journey of discovery vs. yet another top-down program. It is a journey from ‘where you are to who you can be’ as individual players and collectively — as a conscious, caring, committed, courageous living social organism

It is appreciative — building on what is already generative, in a way that ‘transcends and includes’

It grows a 3-way ‘generative alliance’ between the senior sponsors, the cohort and the external providers. All are learning from each other and finding ways to multiply each other’s contributions

It is pioneered by the ‘Innovators and Early Adopters’ — propagated in natural ways as experience is gained and capacity developed

Top management shows up as ‘leading learners’ and ‘learning leaders.’ They are well supported in discovering how to best support this fundamental paradigm shift

It integrates personal development and organizational commitments naturally and organically — at all levels of system

It is self-propagating, self-improving and self-evolving — both ‘horizontally’ and ‘vertically’

Low cost – can start small and spread/grow organically; this allows for rapid prototyping and course correction early and at low risk

Practical Impact

Project 10X is a highly generative, low cost approach that starts small and grows organically, with benefits growing exponentially over time. More specifically, the following broad outcomes can be expected from a 3-phase Project 10X initiative:

Powerfully rich, highly relevant, on-the-ground leadership development experience for both Changemakers and Sponsors

Real and lasting progress on the organization’s top priority challenge(s)

Organic, self-managing, self-propagating leadership development strategy owned by employees and leadership together — complementary to the existing hierarchical structures — grown in a way that is uniquely tailored to the organization

Distributed, collaborative network of leaders-changemakers highly capable of leading organization change and development

More agile, responsive, engaged and change-ready organization

In addition, the figure below shows the very practical implications of Crossing the Chasm — as well as the staggering costs of continuing to cling to the 'Well-Oiled-Machine' ideal:

Challenges

Project 10X is audacious. It aims to shift the dominant ‘mechanistic’ management paradigm in our organizations. It pioneers new developmental territory. It is no surprise then that Project 10X faces a number of significant (and energizing) challenges. They are listed below — coupled with our best thinking on how to tackle them most effectively.

How can a small cohort of highly committed, bright, capable leaders-changemakers create lasting and irreversible change in the face of their organization’s resistance, busyness, silo mentality and gravitational pull of ‘business as usual?’

Project 10X intentionally begins with the highly committed Innovators and Early Adopters inside the system — the pioneering ‘diagonal’ Cohort.

Instead of focusing on changing the minds and the entrenched old patterns of the ‘Majority’ and the ‘Laggards,’ the pioneering Cohort is challenged to find, appreciate and help grow that which is alreadygenerative in the organization — those newly emerging, more generative patterns of thinking, working, collaborating, etc. that are highly supportive of and synergistic with the unfolding change effort.

The Cohort members are also guided to continually attract and grow high quality relationships with other Innovators and Early Adopters throughout the organization who would love to contribute to the P10X initiative, thus continuing to expand the informal ‘changemaker’ network.

What if the senior leadership of the organization resists Project 10X? Is their support really critical? Can Project 10X start on the fringes?

It is true that change can be initiated anywhere and by anyone in the organization. It is also true that many brilliant management innovations emerge from the most unexpected places throughout the organization — from its “fringes.”

However, if achieving significant and lasting shifts in an organization’s managing culture is the goal — as in the case of Project 10X, then securing strong support and knowledgeable engagement of senior management will be critical to success.

This is why we strongly emphasize the importance of the ‘3-way generative alliance’ between the Sponsors, the Cohort and the Providers of generative change expertise. Note that this strategy transcends the either-or-ism implicit in choosing a ‘top-down’ vs. ‘bottom-up’ approach. We strongly prefer ‘we-are-all-in-it-together’ or ‘together-we-can’ as far more generative alternatives.

How the 3-way alliance begins and evolves will be unique to every organization. For example, if Project 10X begins “on the fringe,” the pioneering ‘co-founders’ will need to challenge themselves to enroll 1-2 senior leaders in their cause — at a stage in the project that feels most appropriate. We see this a worthy and important challenge for any entrepreneurial leader and changemaker in the early stages of their transformational venture.

Real learning, real challenges, in real time?

A key design features of Project 10X is that all learning and development happen in the context of the organization’s real life, top priority capacity building challenges. While this approach is highly effective in growing the organization’s leadership and changemaking capacity, it presents significant challenges:

Project 10X is not a traditional, packaged training solution with predefined outcomes. It is more akin to an action-learning expedition to discover (and become) a more adaptable, nimble, creative and thriving organization. True expeditions of discovery are rarely linear and predictable. Often they are accompanied by unexpected setbacks, detours and frustrations — all precious opportunities for deeper learning, resilience building and changemaker development. High quality external support is critical in order to learn to grow from those obstacles.

Project 10X operates “in the belly of the beast”; it deals with very real and urgent challenges; it aims to shift deeply seated (and often unhealthy) organizational patterns of working, communicating, collaborating, etc. While we believe that operating at such depth is the only way to create meaningful and lasting change, this journey will certainly test the commitment and resolve of everyone touched by the effort on many occasions — especially existing leadership. The good news is that every such test is an opportunity for a major and lasting breakthrough.

Project 10X aims to attract the best and the brightest in the organization as part of the pioneering Cohort. These current and future leaders and changemakers are inevitably already overloaded in their day-to-day jobs. Managing both their current responsibilities and their new roles within the Project 10X initiative is a significant challenge.

This may be obvious, but still worth emphasizing. Project 10X requires high level of engagement from the organization’s senior leadership throughout the entire initiative. Unless the senior leaders recognize that they are part of the ‘problem’ and thus part of the ‘solution’ — and are willing to learn and develop themselves accordingly — there is little chance of meaningful and lasting change.

Distributing leadership will undoubtedly challenge the existing power and control arrangements in the organization. What might be a harmonious and co-creative relationship between the existing hierarchy and the emerging, more organic leadership & changemaker networks? How might positional leaders rethink their roles, relationships and contributions in order to support the new leadership culture? The organization will need to action-learn its way to finding its own answers to these questions as a part of their Project 10X journey.

Those invested in the more traditional pre-packaged approaches to leadership development will be challenged to explore and adopt new developmental approaches that are more ‘generative,’ i.e., more self-managing, self-propagating, self-sustaining and even self-evolving. They will be challenged to find ways to weave the work of leadership development throughout the fabric of the organization’s life. This shift lies at the heart of escaping the gravitational pull of our more mechanistic approaches to people development.

The Good News:

Our organizations are not machines. They are ‘social organisms’ that have the mostly unrecognized and underdeveloped potential to self-evolve to ever-higher levels of ‘true wealth generation,’ where ‘true wealth’ includes all dimensions of wellbeing for all immediate and extended organizational stakeholder families.

Though most people don’t like to be changed, they mostly love to have the opportunity and support to be challenged, to learn, to develop, to contribute, to collaborate, to appreciate, to be part of something larger than themselves, to co-create and to make lasting contributions.

The journey will be very rewarding. Though exploring and pioneering ‘Green-Blue’ patterns while in the middle of a ‘Yellow Zone’ organizational culture can be scary and uncomfortable at first, it can quickly become fulfilling and energizing — when the guidance and backing are there.

The significance of these early payoffs is HUGE. Designing the early stages of this transformational journey to be immediately promising and rewarding can produce ‘multiple and multiplying’ positive ripple effects. The true potential in most organizations is like a sleeping giant. Awaken gently. Provide it a good breakfast. Turn it loose on a giant-sized challenge — and help clear the path forward.

First Steps

Project 10X begins with a round of in-depth exploratory conversations with the organization’s leadership to determine whether the initiative is a good fit. Criteria for the ‘good fit’ include:

Deeply committed to developing ‘leaders-changemakers fit for the future’ – growing leaders who are highly creative, systems-minded, relationship-centric, deeply committed stewards of the organization and its stakeholders

Ready to invest in growing a truly generative culture of creativity, contribution, resilience and aliveness

Sees ‘capacity-building capacity’ as a crucial collaborative advantage in the fast-changing world

Committed to purposefully developing its people — unleashing their 10X potential; sees it as key to success

Disenchanted with traditional, packaged, classroom-based development and is willing and ready to pioneer a more organic, open-ended, commitment-based, action-learning centric approach

Senior leadership willing to invest themselves in fully understanding the implications of the Project 10X approach and committed to playing a key role in shifting the organization’s patterns — to be full participants in a P10X pathfinding action-learning journey

Next, senior leadership is supported in identifying the organization’s top priority capacity building challenge, followed by selecting the volunteer ‘diagonal’ cohort, as described above.

Credits

We are grateful to Nick Petrie and his colleagues at Center for Creative Leadership for their tremendous contribution to the field of leadership development. Nick’s white paper “Future Trends in Leadership Development” both inspired us and validated many concepts and ideas behind Project 10X.

Tom Atlee's Social Systems and Transformational Change is but one glimpse at his rich and deep thinking on the relationship between transformational change and our capacity to change our social systems. His body of work has been both foundational and inspiritual to our many initiatives.

David C. Korten's Sacred Earth, a New Economy and the 21st Century Universitypowerfully reinforced our conviction that turning the corner on our many global crises is dependent on our being able to re-purpose our organizations — which in turn requires that we greatly expand the role and nature of organizational leadership.

Dr. Joel and Michelle Levey's Resilience: The New Sustainability at Work, summarizes our challenge (and opportunity) in its first sentence. "As tsunamis of complex change flood through our lives, world, organizations and communities, the need to develop greater change resilience, sustainability, and capacity to learn at every level becomes ever more clear."

We invite you to explore GlobalGEA.net where you will find Project 10X FAQs as wells as many ‘lenses’, concepts and tools essential for any social architect serious about designing and leading generative and lasting social systems change.

The binary pulse between Max and Bill 2013 hack echoeing Bill and Max 2014 story is the perfect example of highly valuable co-operative process.
The proof of value is measured to the quantity of the combined shy 200 comments, while not shy at all as far as quality and stretch.
This is a nice lead and hopefully an increasing trend for our collective ambition;
It is good to learn that Polly did "linchpinned " and engage to move from hack to story grounds.
Keep daring.

It is very encouraging to see the extensive conversation here on living systems as a metaphor and a platform for thinking about organization. I don't think you can have an healthy or vital place to create and human to contribute without that. This paper is raising that issue for me and doing the important work of surveying the field that is contributing to that thinking. The 10X criteria is a great place for the conversation to be launched. Thanks for posting this.

Bill and Max, thank you for your leadership in providing such a striking and visionary framework in which we can truly generate evolutionary social and global change.

The vitality of your words deeply resonates in me and I imagine in the hearts of so many others who will read this farsighted, yet quite practical, invitation to make impactful and lasting commitments to our world.

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.

If you block it, it will never exist in any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions.

It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you."

Your words inspire and speak directly to us about those urges which call upon us to act with purpose and direction.

Secondly, there is an elegant simplicity to your offering. How can we not help but notice how fundamentally and swiftly life on this planet is changing? We certainly see this happening in our systems and organizations. Whether we pay attention to it or not, all expressions of life around us, including our systems and organizations, is also evolving. But toward what?

You emphasize there is a consciousness to all life, all expressions, and direct us to connect that consciousness to its creative and interconnected nature within and among ourselves. In so doing, you not only give intention and meaning to what is emerging in the world, you also remind us that we have an active role to play in what is always underway, and that we can actually turn things toward a direction that serves all of life, today and in the future.

Third, you encourage the unique leadership potential each of us carries and give a direct method of accessing this potential through your 10X approach. By gathering leaders of all types within an organization, they can amplify the well being of the systems in which they work and live. You don't settle for the timid; you demand the daring. In taking this stand you provide a structure and the support to make the audacious accessible. Organizations are searching for how to move past the constraints and limiting patterns in which they find themselves stuck. You offer a pathway that leads them past these limitations.

Last, what I hope people also see, is the tenderheartedness you both infuse into your design. You can't but help see how much you're in love with life. What an invitation you're extending the world!

I have known Bill Veltrop for over 20 years and Project 10X clearly reflects an intentional evolution of thought and strategy for attacking the institutional ailments of organizations. I have never met Max Shkud, but their collaborative effort indicates that Bill and Max are kindred spirits. As someone who had the good fortune to lead a transformative effort in a large and complex organization back in the mid to late 80's mostly by sheer intuition and courage of conviction to tackle the unknown, I very much appreciate the systematic approach Max and Bill have developed in addressing methodically and effectively the obstacles to unleashing the power of people in an enterprise.

Project 10X is meant to take an organization and its people on a journey of sustained and unimaginable success starting from its present reality. Project X is arguably the most effective approach to transforming an organization from within, without threatening the innate idio-syncracies of leaders and management that are the barriers to step function improvement. Project 10X steps out of the conventional consulting approach entailing large projects and investments, which often have been used by management to pretend their commitment to improvement. Large projects with significant financial commitments were meant to demonstrate management commitment to improve business performance. By the time the results of these long-term and largely ineffective projects were evident, the pretenders were long gone.

Project 10X, when implemented by committed "leaders" rather than "managers" in an organization, has the potential to create order of magnitude improvements and long-term enterprise sustainability in ways heretofore inconceivable.

Having been heretofore largely discouraged by the institutional leadership and management reluctance, if not resistance, to change, Project 10X is a source of encouragement. Project 10X brings renewed hope that anything is possible when we set our hearts and minds to it.

Congratulations Max and Bill. You have clearly articulated a significant piece of the puzzle facing humanity today as we deal with ever accelerating change (Future Shock as Toffler called it) as well as the nature of the "wicked mess" (high social complexity + high systems complexity) that now constitutes work and life in the 21st Century.

Project 10X weaves together the best aspects of action learning, appreciative inquiry, Theory U (rapid prototyping), Spiral Dynamics (the great chasm), Tribal Leadership (also the great chasm) and lines them up into a coherent approach to adaptive challenges. My hope is that this idea will catch on rapidly and create a broad community of 10X practitioners who can shift the focus from business as usual to business as nourishment for life.

I appreciate the visuals you include to show the dynamic nature of the relationships in the system and I am grateful for the long hours of work that must have gone in to revising this to make it so clear and, at the same time, virtually all encompassing.

This is a moonshot, maybe more than a moonshot since there is no mandate from a world leader and no single organizing entity to do the project planning and contract out the necessary work to build the rocket. Perhaps more importantly, Project 10X seems to be an evolutionary imperative. Genes and cultural are driving the evolution of life on Earth down a deadly path. Organizations staffed by and catering to homo economicus may be good at increasing shareholder value, but they fail utterly to preserve the one time endowment of nature and leave a legacy that will ensure the flourishing of all life on Earth for the next few million years while our young species grows to a wise maturity.

One thing that might be useful to explore along the way is the developmental path that Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey chart in their book and work on: Immunity to Change. Certainly anyone engaging wholeheartedly in a 10X challenge is going to need to take a clear-eyed look at what they are doing and not doing that gets in the way of their progress; understand their competing commitments; and be able to surface and test out the assumptions that are underneath their usual M.O. The ITC work is applicable at both the individual and team level and seems a natural complement to your good work.

I wish you the best in this endeavor and if I can be of service please let me know,

Your ideas are both audacious and exciting. Yes, they involve a paradigm shift much like the one I experienced in the early 80's when the GM plant in Fremont, known for volatile labor relations was shut down by GM only to be re-opened as NUMMI - a joint venture between Toyota and GM. That such a joint venture would even come to exist was a paradigm shift. That assembly-line rank-and-file workers were given the authority to stop the production line was considered lunacy by the "powers that were." Yet NUMMI thrived (for a time) and vindicated so many of us who worked long and hard to achieve the sweeping changes made possible by the joint venture. It taught me many a sobering lesson on paradigm shifting in large complex systems.

I have recently become involved with activities that support Latino entrepreneurs. Successful entrepreneurs are inherently "paradigm shifters" of one sort or another. Paradigm shifting is in their blood and they pay a big price to step out and do it. We need a whole new level of paradigm shift to empower a population thwarted by any host of factors from outside and from within. I have been attempting to embark on such a journey for two years now. And, as you know I am already quite weary! I become energized by ideas and people such as yourselves.

You have affirmed my belief that true paradigm shifts at the individual, collective, or systemic basis are only possible in community. My community sustains me when I stumble. As I spit the gravel out of my mouth and stand up from my face plant, I receive a hearty slap on the back instead of judgment -- or worse, patronizing sympathy. In quiet reflection and dialogue with the collective, I discover what I must learn and embark again on the audacious and exciting adventure of attempting the "impossible!" As my good friend Barbara Waugh states, "Julia, just think where we would be if you had done nothing. Don't judge your performance on how far you are from your ultimate vision. You have expanded our horizons and that alone is of value."

The cynic in me says that those who have the most power and resources, are the most resistant to a paradigm shift. The threat can feel life threatening and mortally dangerous. As I come down off my proverbial "high horse" as my Grandma would say, I recognize that the have's and the have-nots have equal need to shift paradigms. Somehow its always easier to see the shifts everyone else needs to make before we can own and act upon the ones staring us literally right in the face.

I need to get back to some pressing work. So I will close with one of my favorite quotes:
"Difficult tasks become easier in the doing of them."

Press on my friends! It is a privilege and a blessing to share the adventure with you!

I enjoyed learning of your dynamic approach to collective, holistic leadership. I especially appreciated the way you have situated the "diagonal" cohort of committed "changemakers" to lead the action learning process. This, to me, suggests the type of vibrant communities of practice that offer an efficient course to refuting the tyranny of silos. I am confident that your "organic, self-managing, self-propagating leadership development strategy owned by employees and leadership together" will tap into the potential energy of stakeholders to drive the type of geometric improvement that is called for.

Project 10X offers a compelling approach to moving beyond the outmoded rules which dominate and restrict societal decision making. As James Carse wrote in "Finite and Infinite Games":
“It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.”
I am looking forward to seeing you and GlobalGEA model and foment dynamic new trends that shape our tradition and leverage our new capabilities to foster the generative, compounded growth of individuals, communities, and institutions.

What a wonderfully insightful reflection! I appreciate your diving into Carse's philosophy and surfacing with this pearl. The role of deviancy in culture deserves the focus you give it here. I hadn't let that notion soak in before now. I thank you.

Yes, yes! Three cheers for Tom Leckrone's description of deviancy!! The deviants and misfits of society have been outcast rather than held with reverence as a valued part of culture-making and refining, especially in times when quantum change is required. My complements Tom. Vic D. :)

The value proposition for this initiative is extraordinary in that it seeks to create a network of visionary leaders grounded by the realities of their own organization but seeking to find new forms of sustainable and generative enterprise. By creating a safe and provocative community for "early adopters," the collective knowledge and wisdom among the group can be catalyzed and elevated to a new level. This is why the process described is one of emergence because only through collaboration can the new forms be brought into existence. The value of this is not solely for the engaged organization but also on behalf of the larger society and the planet overall. This is possibly why it right to call this proposal a moon shot, as our flight to the moon allowed us to see the earth below as one planet containing a multitude of diversity. My deepest hopes this initiative moves forward. Alan Briskin, Ph.D. co-author, The Power of Collective Wisdom.

Hello Bill - am employed as an admissions administrator in higher education and have been very busy as a result of classes beginnning on Monday, 8/19/13 which explains the delay in responding. .

Am more than happy to identify the P10X elements which are most evocative and useful for me.
1. Your models/visual constructs are brilliant and very useful for everyone interested in learning!
For me, the most evocative model is your "social architecture" model. It is a path-breaking, concise, easy-to-understand, visual construct that succintly brings to light not only the root causes of today's organizational cultures, but clearly identifies and challenges us to move to states that are more organic and human in order to adapt to today's and future challenges. I want to give you and Max the Paul Cesare "good farmer award" for creating your magnificently illuminating "social architecture" model! The good farmer works toward creating the most optimum conditions that provides a seed the greatest chances of growing to its fullest potential.
2. The organization of your work, your path of reasoning, and my "aha" reaction to your choice of words, phrases and sentences were also very evocative for me. For example I liked your title: Project 10X: "Growing the DNA" for 21st Century leadership in Organizations...the word "Generative" ...color coded social architecture resilience levels. "...grow, spread and evolve of its own volition." ...change-maker infrastructure...computer metaphor...the time is ripe for a major upgrade...Leadership does not exist in a vacuum.
Your efforts are truly commendable. Your work strives to increase sustainable levels of greater good human capabilities which, in my humble opinion, is the central challenge of today's organizations and of our world. It is not just another patronizing, status-quo perpetuating recipe for failure!

Thank you for sharing this wonderfully framed P10X initiative… it brings a lot of things together in one single, simple and attractive framework!

I would dream to see how such a project can unfold in a corporation.

And I have a question indeed, which is about convincing a CEO to launch such a project. My experience in that area is that money is often the main hurdle.

By money I don’t mean cost as much as “return on investment” from a financial standpoint. The question they ask would typically be : “Will the organization make more (or at least as many ) financial profits or not when it is “operating” in the green-blue zone ?”

Firs option is to assert that there is a positive correlation between the number of stakeholders “embraced” in the green-blue zone and the financial profits. It is consistent with James Haskett and John Kotter’s work in Corporate Culture and Performance and it is also consistent with what John Mackey tries to prove in “Conscious capitalism”. Organic is more efficient than mechanistic and it will show up in the financial results.

But I am quite reluctant with the idea of supporting the possibility of infinite growth on a finite planet. Moreover, I don’t feel at ease with the fact that maximum “true wealth” also aims at maximum financial health. Finally, I am not even sure about this so-called positive correlation. I do believe that organic is more efficient than mechanistic but only from a deep, wide and long-term perspective . So second option is to disregard the issue and/or say that financial profits are an outcome more than a goal. However, my experience again is that this option is not very successful or popular.

Furthermore, there is a timing issue : you might have red in Al Gore’s “The Future” about this poll where CEOs and CFOs or Fortune 500 were asked : “You have the opportunity to make an investment in your company that will make the firm more sustainable and more profitable but if you do so you will slightly miss your next quarterly earnings report ; under these circumstances, will you make the investment ?”. 80% answered no.

Raising the “threat” of a mid-term decline or even bankruptcy if the company does not evolve towards more adaptive and organic functioning does not work well either in these short-term oriented conditions (and I am also reluctant to use threat as a mean to launch a positive purpose-driven / aspirational project).

In the end, it seems to me that success in “selling” that sort of project boils down to the individual you have in front of you: either he/she “feels” or “believes” this is something to do or he/she doesn’t. It is more a matter of sharing a worldview than a demonstration. And a matter of shifting the needle towards more desire and less fear.

1. I don't imagine trying to 'convince a CEO to launch such a project.' For the P10X approach to realize its full potential within an organization requires growing a truly 'generative' 3-way partnership between 1) the GlobalGEA 'providers,' 2) those top leaders who know in their heart of hearts that a paradigm shift is a must — that 'what got us here won't get us there.' They have a high level of readiness for a path forward that makes good sense to them and can makes sense to 3) those 'innovators and early adopters' in their organization who would be eager to help pioneer that path. The success of P10X rests on the ability of that 3-way generative partnership to evolve a path forward that make good sense to the organization's 'early majority.' The secret is to evolve a P10X initiative within an organization in a way that is always working with the highest commitments and convictions of those players who comprise the organization. It's adoption and propagation requires generative leadership vs. salesmanship.

2. I appreciate your reference to the extensive research of Haskett and Kotter on corporate culture. Their research showed that the business results for those corporations with cultures that focused on only 1 or 2 stakeholder groups versus those who focused on employees, customers and shareholders were worse by almost an order of magnitude. See http://www.theinfinitegames.org/e05/03.php on our TheInfiniteGames.org web site for a summary of those results.

We argue that ALL stakeholder groups are getting increasingly conscious, connected and sophisticated. We see this as an exponentially increasing phenomenon. To survive, much less thrive in this VUCA world requires that our corporations learn their unique pathway across the 'Great Culture Chasm.' Green-Blue relationships with all stakeholder groups will become essential to stay in the game. Fortunately, stakeholder relationships are not an either/or game. On the contrary, the higher the quality of relationships within and among an organization's stakeholders, the more efficient, effective, innovative, resilient and adaptive the organization. It takes commitment, time and other resources to evolve high quality relationships. We're convinced that there is no more pragmatic investment for those who are ready to lead theeir organizations toward the future we all want.

Today's dominant paradigm has the 'well-oiled machine' as its metaphor for organizational excellence. That metaphor has some merit where the primary work of the organization only requires mindless, perfectly ordered repetition. However, for knowledge work, especially knowledge work demanding both innovation and collaboration, the metaphor is deeply flawed, producing the following 'unintended consequences:' Low employee engagement, incremental innovation (at best), silo-ed agendas, overwhelmed by change and slowness to learn and adapt as a system.

P10X is based on the ideal of organization as a 'Conscious Caring Living System' that is committed to growing 'Green/Blue' relationships with ALL of its immediate and extended stakeholder families. This is only possible when all parts of the organization are conscious of and caring for the wellbeing of the whole — 'wholesome leaders' as described by Arun Wakhlu in his video above. The P10X approach grows this distributed leadership by challenging pioneering souls to evolve their organization's most generative pathway across that 'Culture Chasm,' and providing support that maximizes the odds for a successful crossing.

3. I also appreciate your concerns about 'growth' and 'wealth.' Our prevailing definition of 'wealth' implies the accumulation and/or control of Financial, Material, Intellectual and/or Living Capital. 'Infinite growth on a finite planet' is indeed an oxymoron, especially in the way we currently define 'growth.'

We're slowly waking up to the reality that these are man-made definitions (literally). We can and must redefine these variables in ways that contribute to improving the wellbeing of all life rather than unconsciously destroying it.

Philippe, if you haven't read our piece on the 'Blue Star Future' in GlobalGEA.net, I commend it to you. As we find ways to define and measure growth and wealth in terms of movement toward that future we can effectively transcend today's devastatingly finite games.

'Nuff for now. Thanks again for your wonderfully challenging questions.

In fact, I realize there is a sort of ambiguity between two positions in what is published today around the idea that CEOs and organizations must change :
• Either we say that what is needed to « succeed » in a VUCA world is changing,
• Or we emphasize a paradigm shift that needs to be done, saying precisely that what success means in today’s world (hence what the « business game » is) is different from what it was before.

First way to present the change needed is in fact a management change. The question about the potential ROI of a P10X-like project will be asked by CEOs who are sensitive to this « pitch ».

Second way requires a renewal of leadership (and of leadership development). As you say, the issue of the ROI won’t even be evoked in that context. (This kind of CEO would fall in the category of what I called the people who share my « worldview »).

I don’t know if you feel that confusion but, to me, the article from the guardian (and perhaps the MIX platform itself as well as a lot of sites about mindful leadership and other stuff) sort of maintains the ambiguity. In fine, it will converge and I guess this confusion between means and end is typical of a paradigm shift (sorry, I am not old enough to have been able to experience the previous one :-)), but I feel as a duty of intellectual honesty to clarifiy that vis-a-vis the people I work with.

If you feel that confusion and if we focus on the second approach, shouldn’t the shareholder be then associated from the early stage to such a kind of project ?

Besides, as Marilyn suggested (and thank you Marilyn for your reply), should we find a way to gather and strenghten the CEOs (and executives in general) who want to pursue this second approach (which is by the way the first goal of the project I develop) ?

I wonder if you have pointed to a relationship that is strategically useful for this project? You say "t seems to me that success in “selling” that sort of project boils down to the individual you have in front of you: either he/she “feels” or “believes” this is something to do or he/she doesn’t. It is more a matter of sharing a worldview than a demonstration. And a matter of shifting the needle towards more desire and less fear."
I wonder if the the P10X could identify the individuals with those beliefs and bring them in an "ecology of positive discovery". So by using George Por's suggestion about building on the horizontal connections in the system, it might provide energy/strength/leadership for individual leaders in orgs to implement the P10X strategy - because others are also doing it??

P10X has the potential to influence Silicon Valley's new leadership. It's message holds enough structure to capture the attention of management, while also having transformative language that separates old approaches from new.

Its challenge of application is on us - those who are midwifing the new leadership message into today's old leadership authority. To do this, we must begin to consciously craft an intent, using powerful questions. As this is what will carry a plan such as P10X into the board rooms of today's corporate world.

So, I ask for your feedback with the following:

Consider how together we might create numerous altered engagements with many many many leaders and authorities. How might we use brain-shifting, synaptic-making questions; done in a way that creates a POP inside their brains so loud you can hear it from across the room?

What do you say we all try on the following and share results with each other as we go?

The next time you are in a situation where a lead-shift opportunity is palpable, try asking this question (while adding spice as necessary) …

"As a leader of this organization, [pause] what keeps you thinking [pause] that you can make it all work out [pause] by continuing to think [pause] the way you are thinking?" [total silence; wait for them to answer]

I appreciate your high level of enthusiasm about the P10X approach. I also appreciate your homing in on the importance of creating powerful questions in bringing this game into play.

However, your example question leaves me feeling uncomfortable. It feels like a 'gotcha' question to me.

What I find more helpful is to focus on the highest purpose and the deepest commitments of a leadership or leadership group. If there is alignment at that level, then you have a context that can support bridging across differences at lesser levels. If there is not a match at that level, then there is unlikely to be transformative movement, no matter what questions are asked.

Thanks for opening dialogue about my comment. Especially the 'uncomfortable' question that I propose we begin asking leadership. YES, it 'is' uncomfortable and intended to be so. From this place of discomfort, I guess you could call it a 'gottchya' question.

I ask for consideration to the following -

That these are the kinds of questions that are missing within our change presentations and models. The ones that actually create a shift in an engagement are often the ones that are most risky. By asking daring questions that disrupt thought patterns, we shake loose new synaptic pathways that can create altered states of mind and form new thinking.

I suggest that placing dissonance (even irreverence) into our change processes is very important. Yes, it has to be done as part of a conscious design, yet is more of an art than a science, meaning that timing comes based on the conversations in real time, and not on a pre described plan. When done correctly, it can bring the emotional impact that shifts us from being human to humane.

I say 'dissonant' (as in not 'resonant') because our brains best learn within the space created between what feels uncomfortable (dissonance) and comfortable (resonance). Dissonant questions are the catalyst that sparks new thought into being. They generate chaos, disruption, and discomfort, and open that dark scary place within our minds where change happens.

This can be described as the movement from head to heart. But note that there usually a jump from head to ''gut'' first. The gut is the place where the alchemical soup boils, bringing up emotions that stir the pot. It is what happens before 'heart' is revealed within the room. Gut is the place we fear to go, but must for change to occur and sustain. Yet, we design it out of our models - too scary, too much to loose, so we skip it.

I used to believe that focusing on a group's highest purpose and deepest commitments was the centering objective. But not anymore. Not when I consider the state of the world. I now question the effectiveness of our appropriate use of alignment processes and wonder how we can reopen our thinking to other ways that better move change. Because in most cases, alignment is part of sustaining an existing resonant behavior, even if the thinking seems different. Alignment does have a place of course, but it does not serve without breakdown. Without it, the group creates alignment from their old comfort zone, and not a new one, which is often very uncomfortable. But it is here that we can support real change. This is where my suggestion of irreverent action comes in.

Irreverence, or dissonant behavior, is missing from our facilitation and coaching process hand bags. There is an unspoken boundary that is rarely crossed in our work. We don't want to go there, let alone take another person who is paying our salary to go there. Thus, it is a line that most everyone stops at - never stepping over from the realm of comfort to discomfort. And yet I suggest to you, from my mountain top, that on the other side of that line is what we seek.

My questions to all is this:

What is your experience with these matters? Does it have a ring of truth to it? And if so, 'why'? Do you have examples of breakdowns and breakthroughs that have occurred when the line is crossed? Why do we fear the line so much?

I will take some guesses to ignite conversation as to the 'why'.

Possibly it's the threat of not being liked, being thrown out of the room, a loss of reputation for not being a 'good' leader of leaders, fear of chaos getting out of hand and someone getting hurt, or even getting fired. These are all threats that inhibit the revealing of inner truths we hold. Truths that, if we are asked within a safe place, we speak about them. But if we are with a paying client, or with our peers, etc., we go into a hiding place.

What is this place we all go to? Why do we consistently shy away from discomfort? This is a rabbit (w)hole that needs deep dialog amongst those of us who are framers of change.

Vic, your assertion that 'irreverence, or dissonant behavior, is missing from our facilitation and coaching handbags,' and your reasoned discourse in support of that assertion is interesting and not without merit (assuming it is 'done correctly' :-)).

However, the Project 10X approach is not about facilitation and coaching within the context of the traditional management and organizational change games. Rather, it's about re-inventing those games in a way that builds the organization's capacity to learn and change naturally — organically.

Central to the Project 10X approach is the co-creative developmental partnership that is grown among three categories of committed players: 1) sponsoring top leaders, 2) 'internal changemakers,' and 3) 'external providers' with special expertise in 'generative systemic change.'

These committed players focus on a selected top priority organizational challenge and work together to understand what organizational patterns need to shift to transform that challenge into an opportunity — and to do so in a way that grows leadership and the capacity for organizational learning and change throughout the system.

In effect, this 3-way partnership is committed to finding a pathway across the 'The Great Culture Chasm' pictured in the writeup above. The 'top priority organizational challenge' helps make this de facto R&D process both real and significant for all.

Vic, another feature of the P10X approach is that of developing a culture of appreciation — focusing on and fanning the embers of existing generative practices that are relevant to the challenge in question. The 3-way partnership will both be appreciating 'what is' while also finding generative (i.e., enlivening and lasting) ways of shifting that which is dysfunctional.

I trust you will see this, not as refuting your assertions, but rather as our commitment to illuminate what's distinctive about the P10X approach.

I see your desire to communicate a message to me without taking the wind out of mine. Indeed, this is a dialogue and not a debate. I appreciate you reassuring me however.

The job of facilitating takes on far more than guiding a group through a few hour process. I use the word in a very big way. And Yes, 'reinventing' the game. To do this, we can not be standing inside the game that is being played. We need to step outside the game and see it from there. A bit like taking the red or blue pill, where one of them takes you 'out' of the game being played, and into (shall we say) the 'real' game.

To do create a game, rather than play inside the one we are in, the environment has to be built that allows collaborative design to emerge from the internal players, and not from those who framed the environment. Design for design sake I like to say (or design squared - d2). It seems to me that 'this' is what your P10X is all about.

As I see it, this is a 'facilitated' process - both the design of the model (as in yours), its implementation (creating the actual space for things to happen), and the guidance (ie a form of coaching) for the individuals that enter this space.

I define 'systemic' change as different from 'whole-system' change to allow comparison from internal effluences (usually systemic in nature which does not create sustainable change), and bringing in external influences in junction with inside changes. A design ecology emerges. Again I believe you are working on addressing this by considering the interdependencies necessary for real change to happen.

Finally, this work is much about our frame of reference regarding self and ego, which is where the dysfunction-beast rears its head. Dysfunction is the greatest challenge of any proposed solution, because it refuses to play by the rules of 'any' game. Our emotional behavior, not our mental intelligence, is what owns the game, and can take out any system I've seen devised to date. Thus the points I made in my previous post on dissonance as needing to be a critical part of the framework.

Vic mentioned the possibility that together we create numerous 10X engagements. Such a possibility is inspiring and energizing for me, and I feel resonant with the Project 10X enthusiasm bubbling up in a number of contributions to this conversation. 10X thinking seems to be too important to leave it to the leadership team of one company discovering and blessing it with its decision and resources needed to run a pilot, as the only way for the 10X Vision to move into action.

I imagine, if those of us who feel dedicated to that vision would form a community of 10x practice, a self-organizing cohort with members speaking-level understanding the deep principles underlying P10X, we could open multiple exploratory conversations with various organizations where we know influential change champions, leading to multiple invitations to Bill and Max, and our learning a lot in the process and get more deeply engaged with it.

For such a community to be authentic, its members would need to start it by crafting, exercising, sharing, and learning from our own individual 10X commitment. Another condition for its success is Bill and/or Max having the availability and appetite to guide the development of such a community. Without us learning by doing and being supported by the people sourcing the 10X wisdom, we would run the risk of shallowing out P10X and turning it yet another management fad without lasting effect.

George - thanks for inviting me to this conversation. The model and aspirations are interesting for a number of reasons. Working backwards:

Integral City has been imagining what/how a new operating system for the city could emerge. Our Integral City 2.0 Online Conference 2012 - which you partcipated in identified the core ingredients for a new OS. Not the least of which was "Integral Intelligence Inside". I see one way that could be configured would be thru engaging leaders with the intel that has crossed the great chasm (while still enabling the never ending quest of all those at other levels of development.)

The second area of interest relates to the "how" of creating learning habitats (we call them Lhabitats :-) for leaders to gain the competencies to bridge the chasm. I like the 10x design of Action Research/Learning with the Participants, Clients and Coaches. It is a similar model that I have taught for 14 years at Royal Roads University for the MA Leadership. I see on a regular basis the support of a cohort learning community and the challenge of delivering a real project into a real org or community creates the conditions for at least one level of development (in integral/spiral terms - but similar to the scaffolding outlined in 10X) - sometimes with highly focused/energized students we see two levels of development in 2 years.

Some of the issues I see with the model of working within a single organization rather than having a sangha/community of practice with multiple organizations has to do with ethical challenges. If the upper leadership is not on board to change along with everyone on the challenge team, then uncomfortable road blocks can occur.

Which leads me to confess that I don't believe that it is necessary for the upper leadership to be on board - because thinking from a systems perspective orgs (especially large ones) will change around the edges of the system.

I have long entertained a fantasy to shift a whole (small city) across the chasm using a supply chain approach. Gil Friend and I have been looking for a suitable candidate - maybe some of the 10X participants can suggest one????

Meanwhile the idea of creating a learning community here with the MIX participants is tempting ... and will require commitment to leaderful learningful engagement/research. How many of us have sanghas where we are already doing something like this? I wonder what more could emerge here?

Dear Marilyn,
You wrote:
"I have long entertained a fantasy to shift a whole (small city) across the chasm using a supply chain approach. Gil Friend and I have been looking for a suitable candidate - maybe some of the 10X participants can suggest one????"

We have been focusing some of our efforts for a long time now to look at cities as a "Living Laboratory" for new ways of working and learning.
It resonates well both with the potential of ICT for inclusiveness and with the sustainability issue of less pollution.

I would love to learn more about your concept and would love to offer it to one of the small cities I have access to.

Aaah… Marilyn. What an honor to have you join this exploration/conversation. Your book, ‘Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive’ is an extraordinary contribution to the emergence of ‘evolutionary architecture’ as a field of exploration and systemic learning, It’s a foundational contribution to the notion of ‘leaders everywhere.’ Your work has been key to my embracing the ‘city’ as well as the ‘region’ as ideal units of social design.

Project 10X focuses on ‘organizations,’ the myriad social organisms that largely define and maintain the culture (social patterns) of a city and/or region. The P10X approach represents an organic approach to navigating the huge shift from ‘control over people’ to control ‘with’ and ‘through’ people. It also can represent a large first step toward growing an organization’s capacity to consciously self-evolve in ways that continually improve both its resilience and also its net contribution to the wellbeing of all its stakeholder families.

We intend that P10X be demonstrated and evolved by those organizations blessed with leadership that’s already close to the ‘edge’ — where there is the consciousness, caring, commitment and courage to challenge a scouting ‘cohort of changemakers’ to explore and pioneer exciting new territory — the ‘Green-Blue Zone’ for their unique organization.

The P10X approach has equal relevance at the level of cities and/or regions. We want to demonstrate its extraordinary potential in various kinds and sizes of organizations as an essential foundational step to supporting the ‘metamorphosis’ of more complex socio-economic ecosystems.

The magic implicit in the P10X approach manifests itself as we reverse those social principles and patterns that suck the life out of our systems and its inhabitants. This is why it’s so important to create a developmental game that engages ‘changemaking’ top leaders as well as potential changemakers from throughout the rest of the system. Top leaders have enormous leverage throughout the systems they are challenged to serve. And they have as much to gain by ‘crossing the culture chasm’ as anyone. P10X is intended to help them become leading learners and learning leaders in pioneering that great shift.

Thanks Bill for your warm welcome :-). Yes, I can totally support the emergence of a P10X level of leadership in organizations "at the edge" of the chasm. From a living systems (and Integral City) perspective organizations are the "organs" of the city. This perspective can actually identify key orgs that we might want to influence because of their role as particular organs (along with the filters you are using for leaders ready to change).

The challenge I sense/see these days is how many of the orgs and the leaders have contracted to lesser levels of complexity in response to the life conditions. Do we need to also find the leaders who have the courage to change when economic survival becomes the energy that is apparently required for survival of any kind (social, cultural, environmental)? Even when we know that the kind of leaders of conscious business/capitalism P10X seeks to attract - from their POV it may look like a highly risky proposition?? I am curious if you have considered a generation filter? Do you think (retiring) boomers are willing to take the risks to change, or more likely Gen X and Y??

I appreciate your bringing the differences between generations into this dialogue.

I see the challenge of evolving the culture in any social organism -- community, organization or city -- as requiring the unleashing of potential generative energy that lives in the 'white space' between 'game-ready infinite players (GRIPs)' who can both find a common high ground and also bring synergy-laden differences into the game. I think there is a virtually unlimited quantity of 'fusion energy' that's is latent between youthful and elder 'GRIPs.' Our task it to create the context -- the infinite game -- that attracts and challenges both generations to find ways to come together on the playing field. Both groups have much to give and much to gain from such an exploration.

I see the 'white space' between top leader GRIPs and representative GRIPs from the rest of the organization as a similar source of this kind of 'fusion energy.' Project 10X is designed to explore this potential.

Thank you Max and Bill for this insightful program. This is a fertile addition to my thinking about how to design an organization from the ground up that allows for generative self-organization. Here in Brazil, there is a great up-swelling of consciousness from the people to take responsibility for their own futures. I think it is an opportunity here to start to introduce some of these organizational ideas. What I am working on at the moment is how to design environments where people can enter into a 10X generative system without having to present all of the underlying theory.

Thank you, Charles - I think your intent is spot on. It reminds me of a famous quote attributed to Einstein: “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Bill and I have made every attempt to make it so with Project 10X. I am very curious to see how you approach this challenge! Do share - the MIX platform is perfect for such breakthrough stories and ideas!

Thank you for this fine article. It brings together many useful ideas about organizational change into a single model that I find useful.

It does seem to me, though, that there remain some remnants of our unconscious thinking about organizations as machines in this article. My experience is that truly changing paradigms at a deep unconscious level takes lots of practice and diligence. And so, I offer these three observations in the spirit of helping us to collectively change our unconscious assumptions about organizations as living systems.

1) Why does change need to begin with the blessing of the hierarchy? I am interested in how we bring the energy of the Occupy Movement or of Arab Spring to organizations so they don't need to wait for those with a vested interest in command and control to recognize that they are not working. Living systems do not rely upon someone or something in charge to tell them that it is time to change. How can we encourage and empower other parts of the system (employees, customers, partners, etc.) to initiate change?

2) The 90 days to generate a strategy and path forward seems very linear and mechanistic. My experience is that change happens at the pace that change happens and it is our old desire for command and control that causes us to want to impose deadlines and timelines. It is also my experience that when there is a real organizational urge to change that things move fast and at times even effortlessly (at least in the early stages) so that timelines are unnecessary. If the timeline is necessary, I wonder whether that is an indication of organizational readiness.

3) The conditions that you identify as a "good fit" for this intervention seem to me to be the description of an organization that is already well on its way to making the paradigm shift and is likely to make it even without this organized effort. If these "good fit" conditions are really pre-conditions for making the paradigm shift, this seriously limits the number of organizations that would qualify. I am much more interested in the question of how we nurture and grow these conditions within red, orange and yellow organizations. These organizations are self-organizing, living systems also, even if they are not recognizing it. So, how can the inherent desire for growth and change be cultivated within systems that see themselves as mechanistic?

I fully agree that 'truly changing paradigms at a deep unconscious level takes lots of practice and diligence.'

1) 'Why does change need to begin with the blessing of the hierarchy?'

I agree that there are many ways that change can begin. We are particularly interested in helping systems grow their capacity to consciously self-evolve in ways that multiply their net contribution to the wellbeing of all their immediate and extended stakeholder families. This means growing the organizations capacity to shift from today's patterns of thinking and acting to new patterns — a culture shift that requires collaboration from all members of the system. P10X is intended to unfold in ways that support all levels in assuming leadership in pulling off that shift. It's designed to grow a true partnership among hierarchy and other stakeholders in figuring out how best to navigate that shift.

I celebrate the emergence of the Occupy Movement and Arab Spring. They are both historic consciousness-raising and energy-generating movements. Both are revolutionary in nature — uprisings. We're working at systemic change from a different perspective. We see the 1%/99% inequity crises as primarily the consequence of flawed systemic design — designs that reward greed and amassing monetary/material wealth and control. We believe that all social systems are perfectly designed — to get the results they get.

We want very different results — systems that serve the wellbeing of all life, for all time. We believe this is possible, but will require that we learn to co-creatively collaborate across both vertical and horizontal boundaries. In picturing how a P10X initiative might unfold we propose creating an action-learning infrastructure that provides lots of time for the 'practice and diligence' so essential to change the existing paradigm/culture in a way that is lasting.

2) The '90 days to generate a strategy and path forward' is indeed linear and mechanistic. The fifth of Ken Wilber's 29 tenets of evolution is that 'Each emergent holon transcends but includes its predecessor.' My favorite tenet. We don't transcend the tyranny of linear and mechanistic thinking in social system design by making it wrong. Rather we need to use the linear and the mechanistic where it serves conscious evolution and transcend that which impedes our 'growing up' systemically. We need to equip our systems to design and implement change infrastructure that best serves the transformational process — sort of like the Monarch caterpillar needs the capacity to create a chrysalis to support its metamorphosis to a Monarch butterfly.

3) In my early days of organizational change work back in the '70s and '80s I tended to obsess over the resistance of the 'late majority' and the 'laggards.' In recent years I've more and more concentrated on working with those individuals and organizations who/that were seriously committed to change. I found Everett Rogers' innovation adoption bell-curve to be a potent model for how systemic change might best spread.

Steve, I would like to briefly add to your excellent comments and Bill's excellent remarks...

It is my experience that the 'hierarchy' — including those at the top — are often just as hungry for real and meaningful change as the rest of the organization. I've met many executives who were seriously losing sleep over poor employee engagement, lack of innovation, general apathy of their workforce, etc. Many of these [hierarchical] leaders would LOVE their organizations to be in the Green/Blue Zone because EVERYONE wins — and they know it. Yet most all of these leaders don't know HOW to navigate the transition — especially without seriously disrupting their current revenue-generating momentum. Bill and I understand this conundrum well — and we have a lot of empathy and compassion for the tremendous pressure that our 'hierarchies' and our 'hierarchical leaders' are under. What if we found a pragmatic way to support them in this tremendous challenge of 'rebuilding the airplane while they fly it?' What if we, as social architects, partnered with them — and the rest of the organization — to design and build the bridge into the Green/Blue Zone?

I have no illusions: this will not be easy. It will require a deep commitment and a lot of courage from everyone involved. It will require a lot of action-learning and R&D as we all learn to navigate this new and largely unexplored territory. But do we must. And we want to find organizations with enough innovators and early adopters who are at that level of consciousness and caring, who are eager and ready to commit — ideally a diagonal slice 'in the belly of the beast.' WE ARE ALL IN IT TOGETHER - and deep inside, we all know it - no matter where in the hierarchy.

A crazy idea popped in my mind: could there be a way to facilitate the formation of a Project 10X Cohort, or community of passion, by the inspired participants of this conversation? I'm thinking of it also as a way to say thank you to MIX for creating the container, in which this kind of rich, co-creative conversations can take place.

It's an intriguing idea, George. I tend to agree with Edna that ideally we would engage with 2-3 pioneering organizations/systems to pilot Project 10X - and do a lot of action-learning in and around them. The "outside" community could serve as Providers of sorts - 'feeding' of real challenges and providing real-time feedback and suggestions.

Re: MIX - I truly second your sentiment of gratitude. I am *immensely* grateful to Gary Hamel and his wonderful team of mavericks for creating this incredible platform. Truly - BRAVO!

Max, I might be able to offer one case. We are now in the process of dealing with a request regarding communities of practice in education. If we make it - I hope you can become our community of passion to support such an effort. It is VERY challenging, since the system is very much in the reddish colors and the culture chasm is big...

Thank you for asking. I was thinking more of a self-organizing community of 10X practice, where members develop their own, personal 10X commitment, and furthering the field through sharing and learning from their journey, and making their discoveries about the process visible.

It could be in a mutually supportive relationship with the organization of Bill and Max, so that when the organizational change and leadership development fields discover Project 10C in a big way, they can meet the demand with the help of practitioners, who excel in using 10X in their own life.

There's a beginning conversation about Project 10X over there at LinkedIn, in the Organizational Change Practitioners group. Somebody has just posted: "George, thank you for taking time to bring the Project 10CX conversation to this group. I agree it's an engaging discussion requiring deeper contemplation than a typical post. The rigor is appreciated!"

Bill and Max have done a brilliant job in designing a generative 10X approach that is so needed in organizations today. Imagine if 50% of organizations globally were living in a green-blue culture. What a significant difference we would see in productivity, innovation, and quality of work life just to mention a few key indicators. Then there are the ripple effects that would touch families, communities and regions in amazing ways. An approach like this is way overdue....so lets do it!

The power of communities to solve big problems resonates with me too. Meg Weatley says: "whatever the problem - community is the answer". Yes it is! Wherever there was a disaster, eg New Orleans, and the whole hierarchical structures collapsed, it was the collective efforts of the community that took over.
The Jewish people survived in exile for 2000 years thanks to the community. The big change though - going back to its homeland -Israel - needed a spark from of a visionary, Theodore Herzel, to start the 10x project which resulted in the new State of Israel. Does this resonate with you?

As always, Bill's vision and capacity for articulating powerful models is alive and well. 10X resonates with my experience - especially through the principle of helping leaders and organizations to CREATE change from within and evolve in their capacity for evolving. Thanks

Like others, I kept hearing myself saying YES, YES ... very inspiring and certainly useful for the Health Commons (Platform for Citizen Lead Health Initiatives) but I also wish that your message could reach some of the more enlightened senior executives/manager/clinical leads in the public sector in the UK and help connect them to make a big shift possible.

I am wondering about the possibility of a r-evolutionary change happening alongside incremental changes within a large public organisation. I think excluding one from the other is not how things happen actually in life i.e incremental changes open the space for new ideas and new practices and if connected with each other in a generative process can lead to a threshold for sudden fundamental change in orientation. Of course a lot of isolated incremental change can also just become absorbed by the old system. Whether it does or not surely has to do with consciousness and allowing or not allowing distractions from the destination.

Imagine what a difference it could make to users of services in the NHS and Social Services if 'Liberating the human spirit at work' and 'trusting in the process' became the new buzzphrases and ongoing professional training for staff would offer support for that.
How it could shift the attitude and behaviour of staff and professionals. How it would change the nature of a service when it would start to recognise, value and develop the leadership of all stakeholders, i.e staff, service users and citizens at large.

Working in an organisation where talking to a manager and to colleagues about this would be encouraged and actively promoted could unleash huge individual and collective potential - and in the longterm save an awful lot of natural and financial resources.

Imagine the benefit everyone would reap from a change in organisational culture where frontline staff benefits from enlightened leadership and vice versa.

How staff and service users could feel truly valued in a culture that is build on discovering and growing leadership qualities, that uses action learning and helps to free us from old unhelpful organisational and personal habits.

My observations are that public sector organisations like NHS and Local Authorities are by their nature very hesitant in adopting r-evolutionary ideas. There are exceptions of courageous leadership in public health services in the UK (www.davidreilly.net/HealingShift/5th_wave_files/TheFifthWave.pdf) but they are not yet connected enough to help cause a shift on a large scale.

We are living in a good time to offer new models that engage the hearts and minds of all stakeholders of a service with the destination being a healthier healthcare system whatever that may look like for different regions and different organisations.

Would you consider tailoring your services to a consortium of public, voluntary and business organisations that looks at integrating healthcare, socialcare and housing to serve the common good?

When many ideas/practices/structures/expectations are shifting anyway and everyone talks about innovation but feels a vacuum, this could be an ideal time for Project 10X to support the emergence of a new infrastructure.

It's a beautiful vision. However it still feels very strongly male and would benefit from connecting more strongly with the female principle to ensure it becomes a co-creative process.

I very much appreciate your point regarding r-evolutionary vs. incremental change. My hesitation about "revolutionary" is that if often means "BIG" and "highly disruptive" — and includes stopping and/or dismantling the 'old ways' to create the 'new' — a difficult proposition for many established systems like NHS. A better question/distinction might be: Is the proposed change truly generative? Does it plant and nourish seeds of the new [Green/Blue Zone] culture? Are the ripples enlivening, self-propagating and self-evolving? Such change can be quite "small" and not overly disruptive, but if well designed, could have tremendous lasting impact on the system.

And yes, Project 10X is well suited for large/complex 'systems' spanning multiple organizations and many stakeholder groups. The initial Cohort would include enough pioneering changemakers from each organization in the alliance - and spread/grow organically from there.

Dear George, you are such an inspiring, passionate poster! Thank you for this!

The Project10X seems to me a beautiful way of bringing several truths together and offers a helicopter view without loosing the ground perspective, which I have not seen anywhere else before. However based on my “living lab” experience in the EU institutions and elsewhere I could and would love to write a thesis in response to it, if I had the time. Maybe the model is still based on some assumptions, coming from an older (including the mechanistic worldview) paradigm, and possibly coloured by seeing through more masculine lenses, not being aware of the more feminine perceptions of what actually can simultaneously emerge from the different fields of organisations.

What if organisations resemble more to the whole human body rather than to the brain only?

What if those leaders who truly care can be found in all different places of the organisation, dedicate energy to change and nurturing the independent new emerging in the light of the new paradigm, and are not in the positions where the 10XProject suggests the selection needs to come from. They are not selected by anybody, they often are perhaps not yet so credible and respected, but they are committed, and given their maturity and inner leadership level, they are self selecting. What I have seen over the years perhaps stems from the fact that we are somewhere between the space of “innovators” and the “early adopters”, according to Rogers’ innovation adoption bell-curve. I would argue that the different phases in that curve also happen all at the same time, as well as over time. So the truly ‘generative’ 3-way alliance between the Cohort, Sponsors and Providers of development/change expertise is not possible all over, but well in pockets of the organisation. And last but not least, I am wondering about the rather mechanic three phases, and the “integrate” approach in the third block. Expansion will happen by itself once there is a strong enough core in the field it all radiates out from, and “Integration” does not need to be "done", if from the beginning we co-explore, co-design and co-evolve, in what ever emerging environments as soon as they become ready and available. What if fields from red to blue are co-existing, and its members will flock together and support each other through the law of resonance, and this way the change network emerges by simple nature of enough presence of population of the green and blue fields?

So to me this looks at the moment more like a rather holistic, process map rather than a hands-on tool, that can give reference for reflection and realisation on the way, probably through the way. I would recommend to allow for some more space for emerging approach, getting rid of the controlled selection process, using the concept of going where the energy is. This would add a challenge in the beginning depending on the maturity of the organisation, but much more sustainable, organic and more powerful.

And who knows, maybe some organisations are exactly in the right space for the tool as it is, I would love to see the resonance.

Interesting: the fact Helen Titchen, with whom I share the field of activity in the same organisation, posted just before, while I was chewing on this, seems to me a beautiful confirmation of my observation above! Thanks!

Goodness... Where to begin. Firstly, just to thank George Por for bringing this proposal to my awareness and inviting me to come over and comment. Secondly, a big HELLO to Bill Veltrop - I'm just delighted (and not at all surprised) to see you continuing to pioneer your passion.

I am not a management expert or part of a high-level leadership team. I guess I identify more with being a trojan mouse.

When I read about project 10X, everything in me goes YES! This is an approach which looks like it could work. My heart almost breaks with joy at the concept of seeing this brought to life inside the organisation where the Kosmos has embedded me as an evolutionary agent (the European Commission in Brussels). And my embodied experience tells me that this has to be seen as an organic blueprint of DNA that unfolds from within the organisation - proposing this as ready-made approach that can be rolled out... won't happen. Not in my organisation, at least.

Parts of what you are describing - the cross-silo network of change makers using the action-learning approach - have already taken root (I know because I am part of it). In fact, there are a number of niche networks holding parts of the puzzle that are starting to find each other and link up. And we are finding our allies in senior management, who can support our work and call us in to support theirs. And we are finding our coaches and eagles in the outside world, and finding ways of bringing them in, introducing them to the management (and to each others) and finding ways of getting them remunerated by the organisation. It takes time, but we're gaining momentum. We have even reached the stage where we are gaining enough traction that some projects are being called for by the organisation that will work in (r)evolutionary ways.

What's interesting to me in all of this, is that project 10X *describes* what is needed for successful organisational transformation - and it does it in a very clear and compelling way. But just because we (think we) know how to build an organic organism, it doesn't mean we can bring it alive. We can describe the workings of a complex living system, but we can't manufacture one. Your description of project 10X reflects to me what I have learned from engaging in a living (and unofficial) action-learning project inside the complex system I am part of. But I'm not convinced that it will work if applied as a pre-existing model - I think it needs to be re-evolved each time from the inside (just as the birth of each butterfly involves the self-sacrifice of the earliest appearing imaginal cells in the body of the caterpillar). It could be a very useful 'field guide to supporting organic change' for managers: if you see people engaging in behaviours x, y, z... engage them in conversation to see what they are up to. Find ways of protecting them from managers seeking to control them. Invite them to help you on your project. etc.

I am aware that I am coming at this from the 'feminine' perspective. Not creating a work of art by executing based on a fully-formed initial vision, but growing a mystery for 9 months in the darkness of the womb, with no idea what it will turn out like!

I'm really curious what experience you have of bringing this programme into organisations.

Thanks for your always thoughtful reflections and questions. I'll try to do them justice.

I believe my heart would also burst with joy if this concept could be brought to life within the European Commission in Brussels. And, I am totally aligned with your thought that P10X would have "to be seen as an organic blueprint of DNA that unfolds from within the organization" — that proposing this as a ready-made approach that can be rolled out... won't happen." I think this is true for most all social systems.

In my 40 years experience in working with large complex systems I have a clean track record in that I have never brought a 'programme (or program)' into an organization. I've been blessed with a number of sizable and lasting successes, and made my share of mistakes, but learned early on that programmatic approaches, at best, produce incremental improvements. All too frequently they piss away a wonderful opportunity to make a significant and lasting difference. The 'opportunity cost' of programmatic approaches can be huge.

We're evolving P10X in a way that we hope will give us the opportunity to work with committed leadership teams in a way that grows their organization's capacity to multiply their lasting contribution to their immediate and extended stakeholder families http://www.theinfinitegames.org/e05/03.php.

P10X, in spite of its Yang-centric title, is a fairly balanced strategy, given that their is strong emphasis on developing a co-creative relationships and distributed leadership throughout the organizational community.

Thanks again for weighing in. I always appreciate the depth of your insights, and the pointedness of your questions.

I'm deeply heartened - and humbled - by all of the comments, questions and challenges in this section of the Project 10X entry. Thank you ALL for your most valuable and sincere contributions!

As you might imagine, Bill Veltrop and I get a lot of informal comments and questions about Project 10X over email and during in-person conversations. One of the most common is: "Project 10X makes sense. It's fairly straightforward and easy to understand. Action-learning, personal development, culture change, relationship building, engaging internal leaders - all of these elements are familiar and are practiced elsewhere. So what is unique about Project 10X? How is it different?"

My short answer is: “Truly generative design, from beginning to end.” By ‘generative design’ we mean a design approach that is alive and enlivening, producing results that are self-regulating, self-improving, self-propagating and self-evolving. That’s unique!

My "long answer" includes a few more unique P10X design features:

(1) Project 10X is designed for multiple and multiplying benefits. The approach aims to create lasting positive change in four vital and highly synergistic areas of an organization’s life AS ONE INTEGRATED STRATEGY: (a) Solve real-life, top-priority organizational challenges, (b) Develop real-world leaders and changemakers who excel and thrive in a VUCA world and have the capacity to lead rapid & lasting change, (c) Grow highly generative ‘Green-Blue Zone’ social architecture/culture as a foundation for distributed leadership and much greater innovation, learning, collaboration and engagement, and (d) Grow overall organization’s capacity for rapid learning and change.

(2) All learning and development within Project 10X are highly ‘organic & natural’ compared to more traditional programmatic approaches. There is little to none ‘classroom learning’ — all learning happens in the context of real-life organizational challenges, is self-regulated, and is fueled by the participants’ innermost passions and gifts. Self-managing design configurations such as Co-creative Coaching Trios ensure that the Cohort becomes fairly autonomous early on. The participants receive just-in-time support in personal and relationship development, as well as most relevant systems change lenses, methodologies and approaches.

(3) Project 10X integrates ‘development’ into the fabric of organization’s everyday functions; it keeps ‘core developmental work’ in the foreground until its so rewarding that it’s irreversible.

Thanks for pulling all these ideas into one, coherent overview and strategy. There are many indications that this way of thinking is starting to seed and grow. A recent article from McKinsey & Company called Change Leader, Change Thyself by Nate Boaz and Erica Fox reinforces your insistence that it all starts with leaders sharing the intention of being a generative organization. You are also reflecting Jerry Sternum's conclusions that all systems have some who are deviating in a positive direction and that social change happens most quickly when these forces are amplified. As I was reading I also thinking about Karen Stevenson's work on natural leadership systems (http://www.drkaren.us/KS_publications01.htm). She's sometimes called the science behind the tipping point. If you wove in some of her methods in the steps involving diagnosis of who should be involved in the initial cohorts that would help focus that step. Before computer analysis of networks (Karen's innovation), the organization Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation replicated it housing redevelopment partnerships between home savings and loans, model cities agencies, and neighborhoods in more than 500 cities nationally (surviving 5-6 administrations). They would always begin their social change process having a community organizer scout out who the true, indigenous leaders were and have them invited to the initial partnership workshop. Selection of the core group that has this shared intention and value is a real key, as you point out time and again.

I like the matrix you provided of the different strategies. I hope this writeup is sharable--and elicits some action. it is what is needed.

Thank you Max for the link to the Google 10X article. I’ve just read it and really liked the clarity with which it spells out the advantage of radical, disruptive innovation over incremental one:

“Here is the surprising truth: It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better. Yes … really. Because when you’re working to make things 10 percent better, you inevitably focus on the existing tools and assumptions, and on building on top of an existing solution… It’s tempting to feel improving things this way means we’re being good soldiers, with the grit and perseverance to continue where others may have failed — but most of the time we find ourselves stuck in the same old slog.

But when you aim for a 10x gain, you lean instead on bravery and creativity — the kind that, literally and metaphorically, can put a man on the moon… Kennedy understood that the size of the challenge actually motivates people: that bigger challenges create passion… Suddenly everyone from schoolchildren to the largest institutions were rallying behind the mission. And that, counter-intuitively, makes the hardest things much easier to accomplish than you might think.

That’s what 10x does that 10 percent could never do. 10x can light a fire in hearts, and it’s hard not to get excited and think that other, seemingly impossible things might also be possible. But how can we light this desire to solve huge problems more often — and in more people?”

The Google article on 10X goes on to say, “When I talk to people about it, everyone thinks moonshot thinking isn’t for them. We relegate the big thinking to someone else or some other organization instead... The small companies and startups think moonshots are a big-company thing because it takes a ton of money and resources, which they don’t have.”

Well, if I understand it correctly, P10X scales both up and down, i.e. there’s no reason why some of its core element couldn’t be applied to organizations of any size or even to a single teams within an organization, in a prototyping mode.

The “Captain of Moonshots,” who oversees Google[x], Google’s “factory” for building moonshot ideas, also writes, “Not all moonshots have to be about technology. Gandhi’s Salt March or the struggle for civil rights in the United States are examples of social moonshots.”

Once it gets the support that it deserves, Project 10X can become a perfect example of management innovation moonshots. In my passion for expanding the possible, I imagine also business innovation boosted by management innovation, enhanced by technology innovation! Needless to say, I’m thrilled by what can happen when P10X thinking infuses a 5-fold Innovation Architecture and its sweet spot, as I outlined on the “How to jump-start and sustain a vortex of innovation” page: http://www.community-intelligence.com/node/118.

I want to explore the potential of combining P10X methodology and my Innovation Architecture model, which would require designing and getting support for a pilot project. If you guys are interested in that, let’s think together about where to find it.

George, I very much share your excitement about the 10X moonshot thinking/approach as vehicles to real and sustained breakthroughs - both technological and social.

And a big YES to exploring the synergies between P10X and your Innovation Architecture model. I have always thought of P10X as an "open source" platform with plenty of room and openness for other generative social designs. Yes, let's get a few pilots going.

Max, I found helpful your sketching out what makes P10X unique. I see three more unprecedented characteristics and am wondering whether you’d agree with them.

(5) Given that its essence is not in innovating management (what Doug Engelbart called “B work”), but innovating the very processes of change management and leadership development (Engelbart’s “C work”), it is widely applicable to ALL AND EVERY CONTEXT, where there’s a solid commitment to make those processes more effective with an order of magnitude and stop the hemorrhage of resources spent on them that don’t cause real change. Besides corporations, those contexts may include cities, regions, countries and global systems, as well as such social systems as education, healthcare, food production, etc. Is that not so?

I know that Project 10X is not a panacea; of course, it will not solve all our organizational and social challenges. But applying it to them can create an “emergent platform” that Steven Johnson wrote about in his book on Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. That distinction is illuminated here http://growchangelearn.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/flourishing-on-emergent-pl.... P10X, as an emergent platform, could enable other change processes, such as the Theory U, Appreciative Inquiry, communities of practice, learning expedition, etc. to plug in seamlessly and synergize with each other, thus multiplying the contribution of each.

(6) Research conducted by Gary Hamel’s MLab “found that there are several vital ingredients that always come together when management innovation happens, which include “a distinctive and novel point of view on the future” and “a core group of heretical thinkers and action takers who push the new idea through the organization.” http://www.managementlab.org/research

The 'Green/Blue Zone' culture of Project 10X portrays a possible future not only of an organization, but a novel point of view on a desirable future of our whole culture. Aligning itself with the direction of evolutionary development, P10X can both supports and is supported by that direction.

(7) In Project 10X “the core group of heretical thinkers and action takers who push the new idea through the organization” is empowered by generative action-learning methodology designed to help the group becoming self-managing, self-sustaining, self-evolving, and self-propagating. Thus the Cohort, as an action-learning network, can become the engine of change, turning top priority organization’s challenges into its fuel.

Aye aye, George!! What brilliant additions and what an amazing depth of understanding and taking the P10X thinking to a new level! Love how you treat P10X as a C-work approach (http://globalgea.net/carousel/abc-lens-2/)

George, thanks fo inviting me to this conversation. Your ideas do make sense to me. The big problems facing us all are urgent in health and education and in cities and there is technology available to help us solve them and yet the exploitation is so slow!
Look at schools - kids are getting the potential of ICT while most of the teachers don't. Parents and teachers are more focused on the risk in ICT but miss the big opportunity.
The same in health and in local government - ICT has such a potential for us to collaborate and solve big problems - so the 10x project is a great experiment for all of us to try.

I go along with the general principle of this but the solution seems to me to be rather too structured. This is all about the difference between doing and being. yellow to red are doing but green and blue to work have to be about being. People in these organisations will be different and to start to become one of these leaders one needs to be different - a tall order for someone who got to the top by being the old way. Therefore one needs to help them be different using a Trojanmouse undertaking a small non threatening change in how they see the organisation which leads to a small change in behaviour which leads to a further change etc etc. For more see http://www.trojanmice.com

Peter, your emphasis on the need of balancing doing with being is spot on, and your "trojanmouse" approach resonate with the basic principles of emergence. My only concern about it is that "a small non threatening change in how they see the organisation" can easily be reversed due to the lack of structures supporting the new ways. In my own work with leaders in organizations and change management teams, I always emphasize that we cannot design emergence, by definition, but we can design _for_ emergence. The most elegant design that I came cross so far is the Project 10X.

George - I agree that they need support, and lots of it, but that support needs to come from people and not structures. I agree with the building a network of support that is part of Project 10x but I feel that the whole process has to be more fluid and emergent. In my days of "leading" a blue/green organisation I had a ton of support from Frances Storr (you may remember her) and one of her favourite phrases was "Trust the process".

I just began my exploration of TrojanMice.com by reading your article, "What are Complex Adaptive Systems? It's one of the cleanest, clearest descriptions of Complex Adaptive Systems and Complexity Theory I've come across. Thank you — and congratulations.

"Trust the process" is perhaps my favorite default philosophy. And I really do trust that there's a larger process at work. To borrow a few of your words, I believe we're part of a "complex evolving system" that has directionality. In the biological realm evolution seems to be moving toward ever-increasing fitness, intricacy, beauty, resilience, interdependency and consciousness.

We humans seem distinct from the rest of biology in a number of our capacities, but especially in freedom of choice and consciousness of our consciousness.

Whereas it seems that we can 'trust the process' with respect to biological evolution, I suspect that the equation is a bit more complex for the evolution of our social systems.

I choose to believe that our species is at a unique choice point. We can continue to trust the collective processes that have produced our current dominant world view and the myriad 'structures' and 'stories' that support and are supported by that worldview — or we can learn to collectively work to re-invent our 'structures' and 'stories' in ways that challenge and enable our social systems to become net positive contributors to the wellbeing of all life they impact.

I choose to believe that essentially all of our global and local crises are a consequence of relatively immature and unconscious man-made social systems. We're a VERY young species. And we need to grow up really quickly. And that undoubtedly will involve engaging more women in those maturation, redesign and rite-of-passage processes :-)

Project 10X is not a panacea. It's offered as a relatively low cost but potentially profoundly generative first step for committed leadership teams to explore what's possible for their organization.

I agree with George Por re his thoughts about needing new structures (I think of them as scaffolding) designed to support leaders and managers in learning new patterns of being. Those have to be evolved as an essential dimension of the emergence of a P10X initiative.

Whereas I love the TrojanMouse concept, and definitely agree that minimalist shifts in leader's patterns can have enormous ripple effects, I do believe we have a 'both/and' situation here. One of our 'design principles' is to go for the highest possible game — one that can produce a quantum shift in the lasting difference — a shift that is really important to all involved — a shift from our traditional finite games to the infinite game — a shift that challenges us to design and lead our social systems to achieve the same evolutionary elegance we see throughout the rest of nature.

My bottom line rule of thumb is to make full use of all of the gifts and relationships we've been given in the work of evolving our social systems — and then also 'trust the process.' The same source that gifted us with the miracles of photosynthesis and metamorphosis is also available to us. We just need to learn how to play our role as co-evolutionaries :-)

Nice to hear from you and thankyou for your feedback. I agree with much that you say and when I say trust the process I certainly do not mean the current processes that we humans have devised to run our organisations. These processes I consider an aberration. The process I trust is the process of complexity and I describe how we did this in the article on my website which can be found here http://www.trojanmice.com/articles/becomingalearningorganisation.htm
I am not arguing against the concept of Project X, it is just from my own experience I know that the journey is a weird and wonderful one and I don't think we would have got as far as we did if we had had a plan or structure.

I read your article on 'Becoming a Learning Organization' twice. The second time I highlighted everything I found to be highly relevant to the challenge of 'Growing the DNA for 21st Century Leadership in Organizations.' I ended up highlighted most of what you wrote. Congratulations!!

Your story is a great illustration of the very pragmatic kinds of paradigm-shifting moves that leaders need to make in supporting an organization in developing 'Leaders Everywhere.'

I urge those interested in the Project 10X initiative to READ Peter Fryer's article on BECOMING A LEARNING ORGANIZATION.

I'd like to riff a bit on your comment re 'plans and structures:'

Doug Engelbart, great Silicon Valley inventor, died on July 2. Though he's most famous for inventing the mouse (computer, not Trojan), I most appreciate his inventing the distinction between A-work, B-work and C-work. See http://globalgea.net/carousel/abc-lens-2/
A-work includes all normally recurring work (organizations and individuals)
B-work is intended to improve purposefulness, effectiveness and efficiency of A-work
C-work is intended to optimize B-work strategic choices and implementation strategies.

• Basically, most all organizations design their structures and processes to do A-work.

• B-work is often limited to training courses and top-down interventions, usually based on the offering of a particular B-work provider/consultant

• While Peter Fryer was leading the Humberside Training and Enterprise Council they collectively set out on what amounted to a multi-year C-work action-learning expedition. They experimented with multiple ideas and approaches and harvested learnings from the mistakes as well as the successes.

• What we see in most all of today's organizations is that leadership is overwhelmed by the VUCA world. Their out-dated A-work structures are not serving them well — traditional B-work approaches are not seen as solutions — and there is little/no capacity (expertise+infrastructure+resources) for C-work.

• Project 10X is intended to provide the temporary scaffolding (or 'stabilizer wheels) for an organization to do the B/C-work action-learning needed to navigate their unique journey to their full potential as a consciously evolving 'social organism.'

Peter, if you're willing, I would appreciate having a Skype conversation with you to dive more deeply into your TEC journey. I can be contacted via Bill@GlobalGEA.net.

I read your article on 'Becoming a Learning Organization' twice. The second time I highlighted everything I found to be highly relevant to the challenge of 'Growing the DNA for 21st Century Leadership in Organizations.' I ended up highlighted most of what you wrote. Congratulations!!

Your story is a great illustration of the very pragmatic kinds of paradigm-shifting moves that leaders need to make in supporting an organization in developing 'Leaders Everywhere.'

I urge those interested in the Project 10X initiative to READ Peter Fryer's article on BECOMING A LEARNING ORGANIZATION.

I'd like to riff a bit on your comment re 'plans and structures:'

Doug Engelbart, great Silicon Valley inventor, died on July 2. Though he's most famous for inventing the mouse (computer, not Trojan), I most appreciate his inventing the distinction between A-work, B-work and C-work. See http://globalgea.net/carousel/abc-lens-2/
A-work includes all normally recurring work (organizations and individuals)
B-work is intended to improve purposefulness, effectiveness and efficiency of A-work
C-work is intended to optimize B-work strategic choices and implementation strategies.

• Basically, most all organizations design their structures and processes to do A-work.

• B-work is often limited to training courses and top-down interventions, usually based on the offering of a particular B-work provider/consultant

• While Peter Fryer was leading the Humberside Training and Enterprise Council they collectively set out on what amounted to a multi-year C-work action-learning expedition. They experimented with multiple ideas and approaches and harvested learnings from the mistakes as well as the successes.

• What we see in most all of today's organizations is that leadership is overwhelmed by the VUCA world. Their out-dated A-work structures are not serving them well — traditional B-work approaches are not seen as solutions — and there is little/no capacity (expertise+infrastructure+resources) for C-work.

• Project 10X is intended to provide the temporary scaffolding (or 'stabilizer wheels) for an organization to do the B/C-work action-learning needed to navigate their unique journey to their full potential as a consciously evolving 'social organism.'

Peter, if you're willing, I would appreciate having a Skype conversation with you to dive more deeply into your TEC journey. I can be contacted via Bill@GlobalGEA.net.

What timely insight and inspiration is offered here - both by Bill and Max - and all who have commented. Having worked closely with Bill for 20+ years now - through a myriad of iterations of this works emergence and expression, this is the most quintessential distillation I've seen to date. Bravo and heartfelt thanks for all the contemplation and refinement this reflects!

Needless to say that while what the world need now is not only "love sweet love" - but also in these VUCA times, we/it also needs to be able to expand our view of complex dynamic systems and to develop communities and organizations where people have the personal and collective capacity to source a deeper wisdom and guidance than has previously been relied upon to have created so many vast and complex problems in our lives and world. By following Einstein's advice that "our task in life is to free ourselves from the optical delusion (of our separateness) by widening the circle of our compassion to embrace all living beings and the the whole of nature in all of it's beauty" we glimpse what I regard as the silver lining and profound potential for us all in these profound times - the potential for us to develop our capacity for deeper personal and collective wisdom and intelligence.

The GlobalGEA Project 10X work offers profoundly practical set of lenses, concepts, and tools for supporting communities and organizations with the aspiration of realizing this potential. This body of work is informed and inspired by good business, good science, and deep wisdom from a myriad of reliable sources. To pursue anything less than an approach and 10x motivation of this sort, we run the risk of succumbing to merely drifting along with collectively mindless business as usual as individual and collective self-obsessed trouble makers who simply do not conceive of how profoundly our lives-work ripple out into the world in infinitely consequential ways. (For example, consider the heartbreaking, ongoing catastropy rippling out into the world with escalating radiation releases from Fukushima and how many billions of lifeforms will live with the painful consequences for millions years to come due to the lack of principles, practices, standards, and ethics such as the work of GlobalGEA and Project 10x!)

It really is time for the "revolution in human consciousness" that Vaclav Havel called for when he spoke to the U.S. congress and it's time to wake up together and to dedicating our lives to helping others to awaken to their true nature and highest potentials in order to honor the gifts we have been given in our lives and this most precious world.

Let's support Bill, Max and all involved in this work to move it exponentially forward into our lives, work, communities, organizations, and world!

Also - thanks Bill for your honorable mention and link to our site above. I'm so grateful for the r/evolution of our work together...! (More on our work posted at: http://WisdomAtWork.com )

One of the great delights of this dialogue is to experience a coming together of so many luminaries and teachers who have been so important to my never-ending growing up process.

Joel, it was you and Michelle who first introduced me and other members of our International Center for Organization Design (ICOD) team to the mind/body/spirit realms 23 years ago. The more I expand my systemic consciousness, the more important those realms become to addressing our challenge of transforming our social systems.

You and Michelle have distinguished your selves in bridge-building between the ineffable (and too easily dismissed) spiritual realms and the world of organizations. Until our organizations (all kinds, all sectors and all geographies) see it in their self-interest to become net lasting contributors to the wellbeing of all life they impact, we will continue to be the greatest extinction-creating force since the K-Pg extinction event 65 million years ago. (And, just think, our species is able to pull this off without needing some stinkin' astroid from outer space!)

Thanks Bill - We have learned so much through our work together. Regarding even a question of integrating, honoring, and leverage mind-body-spirit factors in developing our selves/organizations/communities - if we individually and collectively aspire to realize our highest potentials as leaders or as organizations, then how could we ever conceive of willfully ignoring any of the essential dimensions of our wholeness? We are whole and indivisible systems.

Living on the Big Island of Hawaii much of the time and being involved in the astronomy community we are continually reminded that only 5% of all that exists throughout the vastness and dimensions of the universe can be measured and that the other 95% is completely mysterious to us and inconceivable at this point in history existing as "dark energy" and "dark matter." Of the 5% that we can measure, 4.5% is merely dust blowing between galaxies, and .5% exists as material objects. It's a profound contemplation to consider what this means for us in terms of our personal and collective identities, priorities of attention, planning for thriving communities/organizations, and relationship to the undeniable great mysterousness that pervade our lives. Shall we consider weaving a bit more humility... reverence... Deep inquiry and openness.... into how we approach the transformational work of these times.

Senge once wrote that, “Ed Demming used to say that 97% of what matters in an organization can’t be measured. Only maybe 3% can be measured. But when you go into most organizations and look at what people are doing, they’re spending all their time focusing on what they can measure and none of their time on what really maters—what they can’t measure. Why would we do this? We’re spending all of our time measuring what doesn’t matter. In fact, its part of avoiding a lot of the really difficult and important issues, like virtue…” Senge “Reflections of a Recovering Management Accountant,” Society for Organizational Learning SoL).

Of course we need to embrace and work with the wholeness of who we are, how we live and work and thrive in these times!

What a truly wonderful concept, Project 10X, Max and Bill, and a most stimulating dialogue from you all. Like Cervantes, we are jousting at the windmills of the Industrial Age (never designed for people, not really)! We can thank Adam Smith for this model as he described the "pin-making factory" in the first few pages of his Wealth of Nations from 1776. It's fascinating to realize that the most profound critique of this very model was Smith himself, and from the same book, but alas, most never got to page 840. Max and Bill, please tell me how close Smith comes to your own Project 10X approach if you turn his critique into positives?

Adam Smith’s own critique on his model:
WN: B.V, Ch.1, Of the Expences of the Sovereign or Commonwealth in paragraph V.1.178

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments.

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur.

He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.

Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier.

It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.

I think you're 'spot on' in your assertion that Adam Smith's 'profound critique' of his own model, when turned into positives, reflects the incredibly important role of our 'daily work' on becoming who we are capable of becoming as humans — especially as we step up to our potential as conscious, caring, committed and courageous co-creators of and participants in our social organisms.

I so resonate with Smith's critique because of my vivid recollection of sense of my self as the quintessential dullard during those periods in my youth when my work was mindless and repetitive.

Brother Charles, thanks so much for your reflection. I'm trying to remember when it was that we had some contact. Perhaps in the late '70s or early '80s? Sometime after Adam Smith, but before the third millennium :-)

Bill, you, Max, George and all the ones who are really "spot on!" I just wanted to remind you all that you are actually standing in a long tradition of organizing business wisely. Here's what Smith is saying in a positive way:

Done right, workers (managers and executive):

• Understand the whole
• Are inventive and innovative
• Develop the ability of rational conversation
• Are generous, noble & tender of sentiment
• Able to form judgments
• Show courage & welcome the irregular
• The non-routine builds the body & strength
• Grow their intellects, plus social & moral virtues
• And are capable of defending their country in war.

Flipping Adam Smith’s critique of his own model into the positive.
From the Wealth of Nations, Book V., Chapter I, Part III, Edwin Cannan ed, edition, p. 840.

Bill, I too remember our wonderful interactions in times gone bye. Might it have been during the time of Kurukshetra War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurukshetra_War Why, because this was all about "greed" between two parts of the same family. And it seems Mr. Greed is alive and well today, still wrecking havoc on our lives thanks to Mandeville's "The Fable of the Bees, Private Vice, Publik Benefit" and the recent movie "Greed is Good!" Isn't "greed," in part, what you all are trying to cure or move beyond?

My question: How can we learn to "Lively Lightly, Lively and Wisely?"

In sorting our our organizations thanks to 10X, might we also discover the possibilities of going "low-carbon, yet rich in culture seasoned and inspired by the wisdom of past generations?

Charles

PS - George, thanks for pointing me to this lively and wonderful dialogue.

Our work does suggest, however, that Project 10X has not yet addressed its greatest challenge— purging the influences of hierarchical control from organizations and leadership mindsets. While Max and Bill may believe that "hierarchical leadership . . . and centralized control (are) going the way of the dinosaurs," the vast majority of business leaders do not and still rely on both to satisfy their desire for an aura of organizational orderliness. Put another way, how will Project 10X assuage leadership fears that relaxing hierarchical controls—as required for self-organizing, self-evolving, self-managing, self-propagating, and self-sustaining, will produce "out of control" organizations?

Our research found a handful of leaders who avoided this issue by building trial and error cultures that enabled and encouraged freely operating employees to produce self-organized spontaneous order. The foundations for those efforts were (1) deep belief in the ability of employees operating free of external controls to be far more effective and (2) a mindset open to the possibility that hierarchical control is unnecessary. Without either of those leaders typically react to implementation problems/stumbles by re-tightening central controls and torpedoing progress.

I wish the best for Max and Bill's efforts and will be happy to help in any way I can.

It's special to get your input, Bill. You grew up in and became a top level executive in a very large, very successful hierarchical organization. Your pioneering work within that organization became the stimulus for your 'Freedom-Based Management' ebook. It's a great story. I'm delighted that you chose to share it in your e-book.

I fully agree with you that P10X must unfold in a way that supports hierarchical leaders in transcending the pattern/habit of feeling they need to maintain 'control over people.'

Part of P10X's 'secret sauce' is the creation of temporary structures and processes that promote and support the Cohort's exercising freedom in developing strategy and actions that, in essence, free up more and more purpose-filled co-creativity throughout the organization. The relationship between the Cohort and top leadership needs to be designed to give the top leaders practice with and experience in how to let go of their control-over patterns in favor of structural design and managerial practices that place operational control where it is most effective — in the hands of those at the workface.

From the place, where I'm looking at this initiative, the question that arises is how can radical management innovations (of which Project X10 is one of the best examples) be applied to solve our thorny, intertwining global challenges? Holding space for that question would let us see that there's no reason why the action-learning network of changemakers at the heart of P10X would need to be limited to "inside an organization."

As John Renesch and David Warren reminded us in this conversation inspired by Project 10X, the scale of the world's challenges DEMANDS a strategy of that scale and brilliance. So, in what ways could P10X help taking disruptive innovation of management innovation to the requisite scale? I can think of two synergistic ways, to start with.

1. The first is centered not on "scaling up" but "scaling across," i.e.: using emergence for reaching the scope needed to generate multi-stakeholder global solutions, by implementing P10X in a number of organizations with the help of visionary leaders in the public, private, and voluntary sectors. The submission of this proposal to the MIX Prize challenge and the ensuing, co-creative conversation might be good first steps to attract their attention. What is the next one?

2. The other scenario worth exploring is this. Connect with and support the meeting of MIX’s need for "changing our current formal definition of what we are. That is, from ‘an open innovation PROJECT aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century’, to ‘an open innovation COMMUNITY aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century’,” as suggested by Alberto Blanco in the MIX Hackathon's Opening Up the Conversation. Alberto is also calling for "both a modified charter and a modified structure [that] would allow us to uncover our true potential as a community." The 10X model could become a key enabler of that uncovering.

Eugene Eric Kim's comment points to a possible path to it: "There's already quite a bit of inspirational content here. The opportunity is to create structures that encourage practice." Well, P10X, as I understand it, could not only encourage a practice, but also provide a framework for a range of transformative practices. Using P10X, MIX could become the kind of "emergent platform" http://growchangelearn.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/flourishing-on-emergent-pl... that Steven Johnson was writing about. That means becoming ever more useful, compelling and generative in the sense that Bill Veltrop uses that term: "self-managing, self-propagating, self-sustaining and even self-evolving."

Of course, that too would require funding, which may or may not be problematic, depending on whether the possibility of MIX becoming a global movement for profound societal renewal, or "business-led global transformation" strikes a resonant chord in Gary Hamel and the MIX team.

In any case, networks of action learning communities of change makers, challenging themselves to up the ante of their individual and collective effectiveness is an idea, whose time has come. When the old world is dying and the new has yet to come, Project 10X seems to be the ideal vehicle at the level of organizations, regions, and larger social systems.

George, I'm blown away by the extent of your research into the MIX conversations and the depth/breadth/scope of your thinking.

Your ideas are exciting, and are clearly at a different level of thinking than the thinking that has generated our myriad local/global crises. Albert E. would, no doubt, approve.

The foundational premise undergirding P10X is that we humans have virtually unlimited potential, but our organizations, for the most part, haven’t been designed and led in ways that develop that extraordinary potential. The P10X approach involves engaging with committed organizational leaders and ‘changemakers’ over time in a way that supports them in discovering and demonstrating the most ‘generative’ path forward — an approach that both addresses top priority organizational challenges while developing leadership potential throughout the system.

Though we believe the approach has the potential to morph and scale in the ways you describe, we first want to demonstrate it first in individual organizations — and then build on that demonstrated success.

Bill your approach makes a lot of sense; in fact, growing P10X organically is probably the only way to succeed with it. Of course, if we have healthier and wiser organizations, that's good for the planet too. I guess, the world-centric perspective may come into play also in the design of some individual 10X commitments, and in such organizational re-inventions, as Barbara Waugh's shifting HP Labs from a "best in the world" to a "best for the world" inspiration.

"Project 10X requires high level of engagement from the organization’s senior leadership throughout the entire initiative. Unless the senior leaders recognize that they are part of the ‘problem’ and thus part of the ‘solution’ — and are willing to learn and develop themselves accordingly — there is little chance of meaningful and lasting change."

If the success of Project 10X is so dependent on senior leadership support, then what is the room left for change from below?

Senior leadership always plays a huge role in shaping and maintaining an organization's culture — for better or worse. Often senior leadership is unconscious of the ways its leadership actions are adversely impacting the culture. Leaders who don't 'walk their talk' are generally unconscious of their incongruence.

P10X is calling on the Cohort of changemakers, and ultimately, senior leadership, to evolve the 'social architecture' that opens the door 'for change from below. P10X is an initiative designed to focus top leadership energy on creating the context for growing a high level of conscious leadership throughout their organization(s).

Imagine, that decision makers no longer make decisions ... they only act... as one of the core energizing nodes ... and allow the evolvement of the network connected by values, common mission and passion...

As I see it top leadership, by definition, is always responsible for making decisions and accountable for the consequences of those decisions. The question is "What is the focus of their decision-making and what processes do they employ in making those decisions?"

For a top leadership team to commit to a P10X initiative within their organization is a major decision.

How that team interacts with and supports the evolution of a P10X initiative involves many top level decisions — many implicit with how they interact with the Cohort and the Providers. The initiative is a major vehicle for shifting their culture which requires their decisions to shift their leadership patterns and putting feedback loops in place to stabilize new patterns.

"The silo-crossing, action-learning network of ‘changemakers’ inside an organization (with real life, top priority organization’s challenges serving as ‘developmental drivers’)" is a brilliant idea! In fact, it’s more than an idea; there are numerous organizations, where such networks already exist, just perform way below their potential. Maybe that's where Project 10X' approach to "develop and evolve as a ‘generative action-learning network’ of organizational changemakers" could change the game of changemaking.

What if people at the top, who "don’t have the intellectual diversity, the bandwidth, the time to really make all these critical decisions" (Gary Hamel) could align themselves, in a mutually supportive co-creative relationship with the action-learning networks of changemakers? What could then become possible?

I am thrilled by the "changemaker network" model of Project 10X not only because its potential impact on innovating management innovation, but also, because its liberating effect on individual lives. I'm thinking particularly of the zillion people, who until now didn't have a vehicle to carry them to their next level of capabilities, as natural leaders. In Project 10X and the network, they could find a very valuable training ground.

"First the revolutionaries will take your markets and your customers. Next they’ll take your best employees.”

If Hamel's epiphany was also a scenario for globalizing radical, disruptive innovation, or "business-led global transformation," as Bill Veltrop used to talk about it as early as the late 80s, then this question may point to realize it:

How can Project 10X radically upgrade the change effectiveness of Management Innovation Exchange and its M-Prize challenge platform, themselves, in a way that amplifies the power of many of the generative ideas expressed at the MIX Hackathon in February? For example, here:
EMPOWER PEOPLE TO SELF ORGANIZEhttp://www.mixhackathon.org/hackathon/hack-mix-hackathon/opening-convers...

It is so wonderful to see things emerging from all over the world towards the sema global intention supported by collaboration and co-creation. Yet we need also a common blueprint... and the project 10X might just be it. it is time to move from enthusiasm and turbulences towards a dynamic architecture that can overcome complexity in its roots. The 10x approach could be used for organizations, local communities, movements... When it gets deployed in different cultural environments many new wonderful additions and manifestations may occur and the project will go through many wonderful transformations... Great! Can't wait to start collaborating.

I think this description of Project 10X is a wonderful summary of the challenge facing many organizations as well as an approach to leadership development that addresses the challenge. I've known Bill since the late 1990s when we worked together at 3Com Corporation encouraging executives to make 10X commitments. I'm impressed by the consistency of the 10X theme over the years, as well as by the development of enough detail to get started with an effective leadership development effort suited to the times. I strongly resonate with the comments by Bruce Holland and Susan Louise Harris. Implementing the leadership development approach proposed by Max and Bill is challenging. In the past several years, I've worked with two clients using action learning projects as a way to develop leadership while solving important business challenges. While I consider both ongoing engagements to be successes, the road is not an easy one. Two of the biggest challenges have been: [1] the action learning projects are assigned in addition to each participant's "day job" making it difficult for people to devote as much time and energy as they would like; and [2] the focus of the effort quickly becomes the action learning projects themselves, because they represent important current business challenges, rather than on building organizational capacity and changing culture. From my perspective, the key is to implement Max and Bill's ideas and learn from the challenges and successes that result. I'm all for it!

It takes courage on the part of top leadership to invest adequate dedicated time for Changemaker participation, and particularly the developmental aspects of participation. It's going to be crucial that we develop that commitment and discipline in the early stages of a P10X initiative. That will be the key to the initiative taking roots, growing, spreading and bearing fruit on an on-going basis.

I recognise your style and beliefs. One (for me) important question needs an answer:
“What is in it for the decision makers"?”.
In most organisations the decision makers are in comfortable positions and any change can be threatening for their comfort. Especially if you are giving “power” to people outside their peer group. As a result the decision makers will not invite you and will find lots of reasons why they think this project is not worth trying.

It does indeed take a mature leadership team to become effective in distributing leadership throughout their organization. It requires a level of consciousness and imagination to be able to see the potential in terms of improved productivity, resilience and innovation. It requires caring — a concern for the health of the overall organization that transcends personal ego-needs. It requires commitment to invest the time and energy to develop the organization's capacity for distributed leadership. It requires courage to give people the space to make mistakes, learn and grow.

We think such leadership teams exist. We want to partner with one or more such teams in co-learning the most effective approaches to harvesting the rich benefits implicit in distributed leadership. We believe the results will speak for themselves.

Creating new organizational structures or processes simply aren't enough in this time of great uncertainty, volatility and vulnerability. The authors focus rightly on resiliency, adaptability and emergence, which these times are asking for. They also link the deeply personal with larger organizational needs. The 'consciousness', 'awareness' 'internal connection to purpose' is no longer a 'nice to have', it actually is a necessity. We can't have organizational resiliency if we do not know this based on direct, personal experience. Bill and Max beautifully make this connection. Looking forward to collaborating with you both!

Thanks for your reflections. Evolving a conscious, adaptive, resilient organization with the capacity surf on today's turbulent seas, is indeed the challenge most all leadership teams face. We appreciate your underscoring the need for leaders to embrace this as a personal experiential journey as well as a systems-wide undertaking. Your decades of pioneering work in this realm lends great weight to your assertion.

Treating personal and organizational 'transformation' as an 'either/or' game is such a 20th century debate. When it's undertaken as a 'both/and' venture you multiply the probability of lasting success — perhaps even by an order of magnitude :-)

Dears, I really like the approach, and have applied its philosophy myself in the European Commission (see Helen's share of this). And to make it lasting, indeed one needs to look into the processes that re-build an organisation over and again. Most if not all of such processes are geared to keep status quo, and that's why leadership teams are uncomfortable with change, as their own re-creation is threatened. Processes to be looked after include most of HR processes, like recruitment, internal job changes, promotions.
So I have been working on how to silently revolutionize those... linking decisions on positions and functions to the fire, passion and deeply felt sense of both the manager and the candidates, passing through the HR department's needle's ears.

The authors are right on target. Their work is part of the emergent vs. prescriptive leadership and strategy thinking inherent in the Service Science movement (check out ISSIP, the association for innovative service science professionals). Nilofer Merchant refers to the "Air Sandwich" that is the gap between overarching strategy developed by out of touch "C Suite" executives and the employees below who understand the processes and capabilities to actually get things done through collaboration, but are neither asked nor engaged by senior management in effective planning.The 10X concept takes this air sandwich gap head on.

I particularly resonate with the emphasis on new leadership that is capable to withdraw from what Geoffrey Moore calls "the pull of the past" and allow for emergent work structures and processes for innovation. Bill Veltrop has been advocating generative vs. mechanistic approaches to management for many years and it is wonderful to see his thought evolve with Max Shkud. Good luck on your 10X action learning program.

I really like your reference to Nilofer Merchant's 'Air Sandwich.' In my 40 year journey with organizational design, redesign and renewal initiatives, EVERY initiative that demonstrated LASTING success managed to close the 'Air Sandwich gap' — managed to fully engage those in the 'belly of the beast' as the core players in the 'design, redesign and renewal' process.

Project 10X is intended to weave that practice into the fabric of an organization's operations — and to do so in a way that distributes the leadership capacity to adapt to new challenges and opportunities as they occur, and where they occur.

I am totally aligned with this idea of "conscious living social organisms" being committed to having lasting positive impact of the whole....and the key word for me is conscious. As an ally for this powerful initiative I support its creators and its supporters. As David Warren points out the scale of the world's challenges DEMANDS a strategy of this scale and brilliance - "Project 10X" - as well as engaged players for it takes people to put visionary strategies like this into practice and make change happen. Hat's off to everyone associated with Project 10X. Count me in!

Thank you, John. Your whole-hearted endorsement means a lot, not only to Max and me, but especially to those organizational leaders who are pioneering this organizational passage into 'responsible adulthood.' It not only takes 'consciousness,' it takes caring, commitment and courage to lead such a culture-shifting growing up process within an established social entity.

I honor and greatly respect the depth of thinking and comprehensive nature of your Project 10X. You provide a roadmap for engaged, heart driven commitment in what ever organization we participate in. The scale of our global problems demands 10X strategies and it is comforting to see such extraordinary social architects as yourselves put forth a project that recognizes that level of need. As a TEDx organizer, i resonate with Margaret's comments. As a totally volunteer organization, we must re-invent ourselves each year and can benefit from 10X wisdom such as you offer. Thank you!

Thank you, David. Your pioneering work with Peter Gaarn and David Sibbet in bridging among regional TEDx organizers in the service of shared issues and opportunities has the potential to have a 10X effect on TEDx's. Shift can happen. :-)

Hello Bill. I find this sort of material exciting, inspiring. I think that the material is written mainly for business and other related organisations. Although I am part of a community group, this material is relevant for us too. As a community group we are doing some extrordinary things. The material here feels familiar to me, it is basically how we work. Bruce mentions that people within organisations might be tied somewhat by the culture and that might effect how it works. For us, many of our people are volunteers. They don't have to toe a particular policy line, they are free to come and go, a waged position isn't tying them. They are free to move.It is their passion that draws them in.It makes me wonder about the Thich Nhat Hanh quote about the next Bhudda being a community practising loving kindness - what would that look like? I reckon it would be functioning a lot like this 10x stuff.

Aaah... Margaret. How gracious of you to share your thoughts here. Our opportunity to visit with you shortly after your 2011 earthquake was one of the highlights of our trip to NZ. Marilyn and I learned a lot from you and your work in the Lyttelton community. organizational leaders con learn much from what's beginning to emerge in some of our mere adventuresome communities throughout our planet.

I feel very close to the approach suggested and absolutely support the desired results of engaged staff and productive organisations through non-directive approaches. However I worry that you may have under-estimated the difficulties for a person within a system to act differently from the pull of the system. The work of Barry Oshry (http://www.virtual.co.nz/index.php?n=StrategicSnippets.ExperimentalProof...) and experience suggests we need to take the person out of the system if they are to succeed.

By taking people out of the system I have in mind:

1. Giving the Action Learning Groups a budget to operate separate from the rest of the hierarchy
2. Giving the ALG time to explore, top management support to release people from various silos to work together
3. Building in the 'fourth dimension' (time) - it needs to be a systematic program over a period of months long enough to change life-long habits (about 9 months)
4. Helping the ALG with tools to work like Dynamic Facilitation approaches, Open Space Technology and an understanding of systems and Complexity Thinking
5. I support Susan Louise's comment about "having them work on real stuff". I've found three area of real stuff matter. a) Where decision are made in the organisation (tops, middles, bottoms). b) How to get rid of 'square wheels' that slow organisational progress. c) Service delivery standards
6. Don't forget Bills lesson - about changing constraining stories to liberating stories - I think we need to become skilled storytellers
7. Don't forget Bills other lesson - changing the rules of the game - from a Finite Game to an Infinite Game
8. And most important: strong support from the senior management.

I'm really pleased to be a part of this group working to liberate the human spirit at work.

Bruce, what a pragmatic and thorough analysis. Your depth of experience in the realms of leadership and organizational development shine brightly. I resonate with all 8 of your comments, and want to comment on your Item 3:

We're suggesting a first phase of 3 months to support the cohort in beginning to explore a 'Green/Blue Zone' culture, and to develop a strategy and next steps to support the organization in changing its life-long habits. This involves changing both the organization's 'Stories and Structures' in ways that promote and support the shift in cultural 'Patterns' or habits. This involves co-creative collaboration between the cohort and top leadership.

Project 10X is intended to be an on-going journey where various 'cohorts' are likely to become involved. Each cohort is playing an important role in helping the organization identify and adapt in ways that empower individuals, groups and the organization as a whole. The ultimate goal is for all of the organizational members to become 'changemakers.'

Max and Bill's proposition and approach are valid and practical for what has been, until now, an identified need without a path to a solution. The systemic view is exactly what is required for change, although I suspect progress will be somewhat more emergent and non-linear than the project description implies (I am sure Max and Bill know this, and it is no doubt necessary to provide "start here, do this next" kinds of instructions to get things going). The ideas are consistent with business research Jeff Saperstein and I have conducted with IBM Research Labs Almaden into Service Thinking as a systemic approach to creating new experiences in service. The new experience for individuals in organizations pursuing Project 10X will be that of engagement replacing disengagement, and significant productivity gains and new value creation.

Hunter, you are ‘spot on’ in emphasizing the importance of the emergent nature of an approach like Project 10X. Engaging the top team in identifying their highest priority capacity building challenge is but the first step in an on-going heuristic journey. The Phase 1 task for the cohort would be to develop their proposed broad strategy for addressing the chosen challenge — and the next step plans. However, each phase will stand on the shoulders and be shaped by what is learned from the preceding phases. The ultimate goal is to grow the organization's capacity to beome increasingly resilient in our VUCA world. This requires growing change-making leaders throughout the organization. Every organization's journey will be unique.

Susan Louise Harris, thank you for your insightful analysis and suggestion. I fear that you are on target in suspecting that those who would be ideal for a pioneering cohort are also already overloaded. Investing 'protected' developmental time in them would do much to stack the deck for success.

Max and Bill, I couldn't agree more that developing leaders by having them work on real stuff is the way to go. Having them work from their embedded current positions sets them up to extend their growing capacities into their ongoing work and to bring others along as part of "normal" operations. Supporting senior leaders in identifying the highest priority change challenge is critical, as you suggest. The challenge must be something THEY already perceive as essential to the future health of the organization. Even if this highly strategic challenge is successfully given appropriately high priority, however, I am wondering how members of the Cohort will juggle their existing responsibilities. I get how the network structure will be complementary to the formal structure--this is already how much real work gets done--but I'm wondering if you need to build in something about committing resources apart from current operations? You do a great job of identifying obstacles, but I didn't really see this one. In my experience, this is where future-generative efforts get tripped up. Today's organizations run so lean and those likely to be selected for the Cohort are probably overloaded with responsibilities already. Perhaps this would be a key role of the Provider: to coach senior leaders on how to redistribute responsibilities in order to make room for this effort? Great work, and I want to wish you all the best I finding several organizations fit for the journey in the very near term!

Very glad that you invested the quality time in submitting this entry. Well done Max and Bill. For me, I feel that gradually there are more leaders waking up to the fact that the vast majority of organisations around the world are still playing way below their true potential. Your work is a valuable contribution to the growing "capacity-building capacity" efforts in many countries, helping to accelerate the closing of this enormous capability gap. In Gary Hamel's HBR article from Feb2009 "Moon Shots for Management", number 7 reads: "Redefine the work of leadership. The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration."

Resonate with the analysis. My experience shows that the senior team has to wake and feel a genuine need. Ideally a breakdown of some sort can do that if one exists. However, you can often create or reveal a breakdown within the organization. One simple way is to conduct focus groups or people within the organization that often reveals the resignation, diminished commitment, and poor expectations of the future. A follow-up inquiry into why these feelings and assessments exist can often provide the opening you are seeking.

Also, I have found self-managed, collegial "learning teams" can be a good tool for generating dsitributed and shared leadership.